BigLaw Firms Offer Lucrative Incentives to Lateral Candidates

This article was adapted from an essay that first appeared in the essay collection America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance (MIT Press, 2026).***We are on the cusp of some revolutionary new reproductive technologies. Yet the Supreme Court has been silent on how to think about what the Constitution might have to say about the last wave of technologies dating back to the early 1980s. Questions about the propriety of destroying embryos, whether women can lawfully agree to sell their reproductive labor as surrogates, gene editing, radically new forms of family formation, as well as questions of dignity, access, and equality, cut to the quick of what kind of country we are. To the extent we view the Constitution as the ultimate repository of those values, the court’s current silence on what the Constitution means feels deafening.So, why the silence? Is it good or bad? What would a bold constitutionalizing project look like for this space?Consider in vitro gametogenesis, in which one can take skin or other somatic cells, derive induced pluripotent stem cells, and direct them to become sperm or eggs that could be used for reproduction, as one of the cutting-edge reproductive technologies we may soon see. Indeed, the technology can likely enable cross-sex gametes – sperm from women and eggs from men – enabling both partners of same-sex couples to be equal genetic contributors to reproducing, or potentially for a single individual to contribute sperm and egg to the same chi