Instructor: Dov Greenbaum

View all teaching evaluations for this course - degree students only

Units: 2

Grading Designation: Graded

Mode of Instruction: In-Person

Meeting:

W 6:25 PM - 8:15 PM

Location: Law 134

From August 19, 2026

To November 30, 2026

Course Start: August 19, 2026

Course End: November 30, 2026

Class Number: 33337

Enrollment info:

Enrolled: 0

Waitlisted: 0

Enroll Limit: 30

As of: 04/07 07:09 AM

This course examines how different legal and regulatory systems respond to contemporary biotechnology challenges through a comparative governance lens. The course approaches "Jewish bioethics" as a body of legal-regulatory reasoning about biotechnology, not as personal religious guidance or pastoral counsel.

Using Jewish legal traditions alongside U.S. law, international frameworks, and secular bioethics, students analyze how biotechnology is regulated in practice, focusing in particular on institutional design: who has authority to decide, what decision-making processes are legitimate, and how regulatory systems manage scientific uncertainty and moral disagreement.

The course is fundamentally about biotechnology ethics and regulation and comparative law methodology, not religious studies. Jewish legal reasoning is treated as one sophisticated legal-regulatory framework among several, selected because it offers distinctive institutional and procedural approaches to questions every legal system must confront: What forms of human enhancement are permissible? Who controls reproductive technologies? How should genetic modification be governed? Under what conditions, if any, should humanity create novel life forms or use biotechnology in planetary settlement and environmental intervention? A central theme is that regulatory outcomes often turn less on abstract agreement about values than on how a system allocates authority and structures decision-making.

Across each topic, students examine how legal systems distribute power among legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, experts, markets, and individuals; how they incorporate scientific expertise; how they treat disagreement within pluralistic societies; and how they translate contested normative commitments into operational rules. This institutional focus makes the course's comparative framework transferable across emerging technology domains, including AI governance, climate engineering, and other areas where law must balance innovation, safety, autonomy, dignity, and collective welfare.

Israel provides particularly valuable comparative material as a jurisdiction where secular and diverse religious perspectives intersect directly in legislation and regulation. The course uses Israel and Jewish law to anchor the comparative exercise in concrete legal conflicts and pluralism debates—examining how a democratic legal system navigates deep normative disagreement on foundational questions, and how institutional arrangements mediate conflict between individual rights, professional authority, public welfare, and collective identity. These dynamics offer lessons directly applicable to polarized debates in the United States and beyond. The course examines three core areas that every biotechnology governance system must address: (1) assisted reproduction and control over reproductive technologies, (2) human genetic modification including germline editing, and (3) synthetic biology and the creation of novel organisms. Students will collaboratively select a couple of additional topics based on class interest and emerging developments from options including: prenatal genetic testing and selection, genome refactoring, cognitive and physical enhancement technologies, emerging neurotechnologies, biotechnology in climate mitigation, planetary protection and Mars settlement governance, AI-augmented medical decision-making, and the legal status of synthetic life forms.

For each topic, the course compares U.S. statutory and case law, agency governance, international treaties and guidelines, secular bioethical positions, and Jewish legal reasoning to understand how different institutional architectures, and the interpretive methods they authorize, produce different regulatory outcomes. Case studies may include mitochondrial replacement therapy ("three-parent IVF"), preimplantation genetic diagnosis for non-medical trait selection, governance responses to human germline editing, agricultural gene modification and environmental release regulation, and emerging questions about ownership, liability, and biosafety in technologies that may fundamentally alter life itself.

Readings are limited and curated to provide focused exposure to each regulatory framework without overwhelming breadth. For each topic, students engage with representative primary legal materials (statutes, cases, regulations), comparative examples, and analytical frameworks, with materials selected for their capacity to illuminate institutional design choices rather than comprehensive coverage.

All materials are provided in English with full contextual framing. No background in Jewish texts, Hebrew, religious studies, or biological sciences is required or assumed. The course teaches legal and regulatory analysis, not religious practice or belief.

Assessment Course assessment consists of: Class participation in discussion (20%) In-class presentation (20%): A 10-15 minute presentation of the research question, comparative framework, and preliminary findings for the final paper Final research paper (60%): A 20-25 page paper comparing how different legal and regulatory systems address an emerging technology governance challenge of the student's choosing (topics may extend beyond biotechnology to any emerging technology domain) Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: Analyze major regulatory frameworks governing biotechnology in U.S., international, and comparative contexts Explain how foundational assumptions and institutional structures in different legal systems produce divergent regulatory outcomes Apply comparative legal methodology to emerging technology governance across domains Critically evaluate competing regulatory models and their institutional tradeoffs Develop and defend a structured comparative analysis of a novel policy challenge in any technology field.

Exam Notes: (P) Final Paper

(Subject to change by faculty member only through the first two weeks of instruction)

Course Category: International and Comparative Law

This course is listed in the following sub-categories:

Law in Cultural Perspective

Public Law and Policy

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