The 2017 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law will feature Camille Gear Rich, Associate Provost for Faculty and Student Initiatives in the Social Sciences, and Professor of Law and Sociology at USC. Ms. Rich will deliver her lecture titled, "Freedom of Contract and the Mono-Racial Family." About the lecture: This presentation explores the Jennifer Cramblett artificial insemination litigation concerning racially misidentified sperm to identify the lessons the case teaches us about contemporary stall points in conversations about race, and the role individual family-formation decisions play in maintaining racial understandings. When Jennifer Cramblett and her lesbian partner walked up the steps of the Midwestern Sperm Bank to collect the contents of Vial 380 —the sperm from the donor of their choice, they had no inkling of controversy that would ensue. Cramblett and her partner, a white working class couple, had saved money to make the purchase and carefully selected a donor that “looked like them.” This seemingly innocent, aesthetic family formation decision —an almost unconscious expectation most Americans have when they think about biologically related family members, was critical to their decision-making process. Biology barred Cramblett and her partner from creating a child together, but technology cast those biological limitations asunder, and instead offered a path through the market to exercise her right to reproductive freedom and family formation. Cramblett’s purchase of her way into motherhood would have remained a minor, private matter had that one small sperm transaction not gone awry. Unfortunately, one minor mistake - a clerk grabbed Vial 330 instead of Vial 380, and Cramblett was impregnated with the sperm of a black donor instead of the white donor she had selected. Cramblett’s subsequent suit laid bare the politics of the sperm market - a marketplace that explicitly catalogues and prices a commodity based race. Her suit revealed an American consumer base that expects racial segregation of sperm and indeed is even prepared to litigate over intrusions that disrupt their expectation and purchase of a monoracial family. Cramblett’s suit, her various representations of breach, damages and injury reveal a great deal about Americans’ contemporary understanding of race – fits and starts, uncertain definitions, taboo subjects and common sense understandings work in inconsistent and often indefensible ways as Americans negotiate the current racial landscape. Additionally those offended by Cramblett’s suit are pushed to engage with a series of provocative propositions, ones that reveal the way the law of contract has been used to protect Americans’ preference for, expectation and interest in the maintenance of the monoracial family. This talk takes us out of the world of innocent “private preference” to a discussion of the role the market plays in structuring personal intimate preferences and further whether we are prepared to do what is necessary to shape private preferences in new ways. Certainly, the interracial family can in some circumstances function as an important pathway to racial equality; however our typically unarticulated expectations regarding the monoracial family still mark a dividing line in what individuals are prepared to change in pursuit of this goal. This discussion of family formation contracts, of commercial intimacy contracts will force us to engage with the ways the market reveals and re-instantiates race’s continuing value. Established in 1981 in memory of Professor Brigitte M. Bodenheimer, this endowed lecture brings scholars and practitioners to King Hall to discuss recent developments affecting the family.