Contested Commodities

Rating:
Summary: An outstanding treatment of a most important subject
Review: Radin deals thoughtfully with some virgin territory in legal and social theory -- the question of what theoretical grounds might underlie the common intuition that some valued (indeed cherished) things should be treated by the law as (in whole or in part) "not for sale." Such items as children, body parts, sexual relations, votes, opinions, and the like are among the candidates for this status, and many things that are traded on markets have commerce in them restricted for reasons that relate neither to market efficiency nor fair distribution, but rather to the transformation in meaning (and ultimately value) that can occur when it something is treated as a commodity. Radin's discussion of these novel issues does not resolve them in any simple way, but better than anything else on the subject reveals how sticky they can be. T. Gre