Hi, folks. As Julie mentioned in her intro post, I’ll be guest blogging at Repo Repro this summer while she masters the bar exam. A little about me: I’m headed into my second year at UC Davis School of Law (King Hall) and will be co-chairing my LSRJ chapter for the 2008-2009 academic year. I’m also a news junkie, and blogging is one of the things I do for fun (yeah, huge nerd here) so I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to apply those dubious talents for a good cause. Thanks for reading!

–Erin Simonitch

Small changes can make a big difference.

It’s a principle that helps sustain and hearten those of us committed to social justice. Without it, the magnitude of the work would overwhelm us. But it’s a double-edged sword, because the principle operates whether the change is for better or for worse. So it’s also why law schools drill “baby lawyers” to obsess over details and precise wording. Use the wrong language in a contract agreement, leave out an important detail, fail to thoroughly define your terms, and sooner or later the consequences will explode into thousands of dollars of unnecessary expenses, while you’re stuck in court debating the meaning of the word “chicken.” (As my property professor likes to point out, litigators exist to clean up other lawyers’ messes.)

Members of Congress demonstrated their failure to understand this concept when they passed the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, making a small change in federal Medicaid law that has a big impact on young women’s access to contraceptives. Before the Act’s passage, pharmaceutical companies could and did offer hormonal contraceptives at significant discounts. But in drafting the new rules for calculating Medicaid rebates, lawmakers left out a provision that would have preserved those discounts for campus health centers. Now, pharm companies must sell contraceptives to clinics at higher prices or suffer a financial penalty–a “business decision” that’s all too easily made by corporations for whom the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.

The result, of course, is that students pay the price. Contraceptive costs have risen dramatically on college and university campuses, sometimes as much as 500%.

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Here’s a not so hypothetical hypo (yes, I’m studying for exams, so I am awash in hypos): an LSRJ chapter plans an event called “Sex Toys 101″ in which they plan to bring in an educator from a local shop to teach students about sexual health and pleasure and to facilitate a discussion about state laws around the country concerning the legality of sex toys. Two hours before the event, the school’s assistant dean cancels it, citing some school regulation that bans the selling or promotion of commercial products by a private company. Except that no one was promoting or selling anything — anything, that is, other than a sex-positive attitude. The student group yells censorship. The dean says it’s just a simple case of misapplication of school rules.

Sound far-fetched? Think again. This is going on right now at the University of Wisconsin. And the school’s LSRJ chapter is in the thick of it. The chain of events might make more sense in, say, Alabama or Texas — states with a recent history of outlawing sex toys — but in Wisconsin? So it is.

Luckily, it appears as if the law school community is seeing through the dean’s flimsy reasoning. From the blog of one professor: “That sure sounds reasonable, and it might be if it wasn’t bulls**t!”

And so it appears. The person who came to speak at the event provided the education as a public service. Experts from Babeland have done the same thing at NYU without incident. They don’t bring anything to sell or push students to patronize the store. Instead, they come to promote safe and healthy sexuality. Shouldn’t a graduate school with a student body made up wholly of adults want its students to have access to all the information necessary to make informed, empowered, and healthy sexual choices? Wouldn’t a law school want to nurture the ideals of the First Amendment?

Wisconsin LSRJ thinks so, and the group is organizing students on campus to protest the dean’s actions. The major league blogs have picked up. And the pressure is mounting. But I guess this is the fight we a society can expect when we allow the government to fund abstinence-only “education” programs, which plant the seed of our dysfunctional thinking about sexuality.