Domestic workers, disproportionately foreign women, have long been accorded a place in our households, but not in our law. Nearly a century ago, the New Deal and Civil.Rights statutes excluded this female labor force from worker protections. More generally, migrant domestic workers around the world have often found themselves with little protection under national or international law. Yet a subtle shift has taken hold in recent decades, as domestic workers bring home the legal world around them. This Article uncovers how domestic workers redistribute power within private households and beyond in ways that influence international lawmaking. It focuses on the scope of diplomatic immunity in domestic workers' lawsuits; the newly vindicated rights of au pairs; and, finally, bilateral treaties between exporters and importers of domestic labor. Across these three arenas, this Article shows how domestic workers reorient conceptions of self-, household, and national sovereignty to build a new legal world of domestic work. The three forms of sovereignty provide a vocabulary to describe how domestic workers are bringing public law from far-off corners into our most private places. In doing so, they are enhancing their own self-sovereignty and challenging that of households and nations.
Of the forms of reproductive labor in which legal scholars have been interested, placenta, the organ developed during pregnancy, has been overlooked. As placenta becomes an object of value for a growing number of individuals, researchers, clinicians, biobanks, and biotech companies, among others, its cultural meaning is changing. At the same time, these various constituencies may be at odds. Some postpartum parents and their families want to repossess their placenta for personal use, while third parties use placentas for a variety of research, medical, and commercial purposes. This Article contributes to the scholarship on reproductive justice and agency by asking who should have access to placentas and under what conditions. The Article emphasizes the insufficient protection the law affords pregnant people wishing to decide what happens to their placenta. Generally considered clinical waste under federal and state law, placental tissue is sometimes made inaccessible to its producers on the ground that it is infectious at the same time as it is made available to third parties on the ground that placenta is discarded and de-identified tissue. Less privileged people who lack the ability to shop for obstetric and other pregnancy-related services that allow them to keep their placentas are at a disadvantage in this chain of supply and demand. While calling for further research on the modus operandi of placenta markets and how pregnant people think about them, this Article concludes that lawmakers should take steps to protect decision-making autonomy over placental labor and offers a range of proposals to operationalize this idea.
