Events

American Enterprise Institute
March 26, 2010

This year, more than 100,000 Americans will be diagnosed with a potentially deadly blood disease. Among those in need of lifesaving, blood-producing marrow cells, thousands will die because it is so difficult to find a nearly perfect genetic match and marrow donors are in short supply.

Material incentives, from tax credits to scholarship aid, might encourage more people to donate marrow cells. Earlier this year, plaintiffs represented by the Institute of Justice filed a constitutional challenge to the federal law that forbids offering incentives to donors. The plaintiffs argue that the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, which prohibits compensation for organ and bone marrow donation, violates their right to participate in lifesaving medical treatment.

The Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss the case. Attorney General Eric Holder argues that there are many reasons for banning the sale of bone marrow and that there is no fundamental right to offer financial incentives to potential organ donors.  Discussing these arguments will be Michael S. Greve, the John G. Searle scholar at AEI; Jeff Rowes, a senior attorney at the Institute of Justice who is representing the plaintiffs in the above-mentioned constitutional challenge; Randy Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center; M. Edward Whelan III, a lawyer and the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and AEI resident scholar Sally Satel, M.D., coauthor and editor of When Altruism Isn't Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors (AEI Press, 2009).

For event details see: www.aei.org/event/100215