PROFESSOR MARTIN SKLADANY ON HOW BODILY AUTONOMY PRESERVES DEMOCRACY
September 2024 — Martin Skladany, Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, recently published an article in The New Republic. “How the Anti-Abortion Movement Undermines Democracy” explores how the Democrats’ new “freedom” rhetoric on reproductive rights isn’t just playing well with the public . . . it’s also a broader defense of individual liberty against would-be authoritarians.
Skladany explains that “With free speech and bodily autonomy, what needs to be protected by the law and what we desire ethically can conflict. In such situations no one must be dissuaded from their ethical values, yet we have to understand that democratic principles must at times take precedence.”
Professor Martin Skladany is a professor of intellectual property, law and international development, and law and technology. He is the author of Copyright's Arc (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Big Copyright Versus the People: How Major Content Providers are Destroying Creativity and How to Stop Them (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Previously, as a copyright and litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, he was a member of the legal team that represented the Association of American Publishers in the Google Books copyright suit.