Michael H. Shapiro, '64: "Constitutional Expert Speaks His Mind on the Tough Questions"

In the office of Michael H. Shapiro, piles of paper cover almost every horizontal surface.

“I’ve got stuff on the floor back there from the 1994 earthquake,” the USC Gould School of Law professor said.

Shapiro, the Dorothy W. Nelson Professor of Law and a specialist in bioethics and in constitutional law, enjoys analyzing the issues that advances in the biomedical sciences generate. Take surrogate motherhood: If a woman gives birth to a child created in vitro from another woman’s egg, who is the mother?

Or consider a hypothetical scenario that Shapiro first laid out in a landmark 1974 article, “Who Merits Merit?”: If we had the biotechnological capability to significantly increase a person’s IQ, whom should we target? Would it be the smartest people who might then achieve great things for the benefit of all? Or would it be those with the largest intellectual deficits?

Continue reading: http://news.usc.edu/122436/constitutional-expert-speaks-his-mind-on-the…

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