H.C. Robinson is a first-year graduate student in the HASTS program. She comes to MIT from Harvard Law School, where she received her J.D. in 2006 and served as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching from 2006-2007. Her broad research interest involves the role of law in the transformation of norms by scientific innovation. In teaching, she aims to bring a multidisciplinary approach to those aspects of the law curriculum that intersect most closely with scientific innovation. In her law studies, H.C. explored the impact of paternity testing, sperm and ovum donation, and surrogacy arrangements on legal doctrines that presuppose a heterosexual, nuclear family as the sole basis for lawful kinship. She concluded that the law itself acts like a specialized technology, relying on normative understandings of kinship (such as intent to create a family) rather than on biological certainties (like genetic relatedness) to render what science makes possible (reproduction) as an outcome both legally viable and socially significant (parenthood).
In her continuing scholarly work, H.C. is exploring the growing practice of law enforcement agencies to search forensic DNA databases using algorithms that can detect individuals who are first-order relatives of criminals whose samples are included in the database. She aims to elucidate the legal and ethical dimensions of the questions: 1) whether genetic resemblance to a criminal forensic sample is reasonable cause for suspicion, investigation, and detention; 2) whether it is just punishment of criminals for the state to acquire from them the material basis for lifetime genetic surveillance of close family members; and 3) whether the skewed racial demographics of the (predominantly black and Hispanic) prison population will be perpetuated and entrenched by searching the present DNA databases using kinship detection methods.
biological sciences; genomics; surveillance technology; forensics; stigma; race; gender; law; science and democracy; equality
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
MIT HASTS Building E51-185 | 617-253-9759 | hasts@mit.edu |
