Rutgers Law Professors Christina S. Ho and Katie Eyer
Two Rutgers Law School professors are the 2023 recipients of the Greg Lastowka Award for Scholarly Excellence. This is the first Lastowka award for Newark-based Professor Christina S. Ho. Camden-based Professor Katie Eyer also received a Lastowka Award in 2018.
Winners receive a prize of $1,500 each to be used for their scholarly research in a way that contributes to the scholarly life of the law school. The award is given to professors who are nominated and selected by their peers. The Lastowka Award started in 2016 in memory of Rutgers Law Professor Greg Lastowka, an expert in cyber law, who died of cancer in 2015.
Christina S. Ho, Rutgers Law School Professor and 2023 Lastowka Award Winner
Christina S. Ho
"The Lastowka award exists to honor Greg Lastowka and the standard he set as a member of our wonderful faculty here at Rutgers,” said Professor Ho. “Our colleagues who have won the Lastowka Award in past years are among those whose scholarship I admire the most, so a large part of the honor for me comes from being in their company. I am so grateful to be a part of this inspiring and supportive community."
Professor Ho’s award is conferred on the strength of a forthcoming law review article proposing government reinsurance for health coverage, two chapters for edited volumes, and a book manuscript which will be published by Oxford University Press this spring titled, Normalizing an American Right to Health.
The book offers a fresh way to argue for a right to health in the U.S. While Medicare-for-All proponents mobilize a frontal assault, this book undertakes a coordinated flanking maneuver to make more space for health rights arguments in the U.S. She said, “This is something we desperately need given what I think is a growing sense of mute outrage over our cavalier abandonment of people to risk and suffering in these times.” She continued, “The book’s message is, perhaps surprisingly, a hopeful one. It pushes back against the conventional wisdom that a right to health is out of reach in the U.S. by showing that the necessary change is not extraordinary, but familiar, and that the law has already laid considerable groundwork in ordinary statutes and case law.”
Katie Eyer, Rutgers Law School Professor and 2023 Lastowka Award Winner
Katie Eyer
Professor Eyer was recognized for her recent work on transgender constitutional law issues and on progressive textualism. Her article, Transgender Constitutional Law, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, is the first article to offer a comprehensive account of the large volume of transgender constitutional law cases which have been decided in recent years. Her related article, Transgender Equality and Geduldig 2.0, offers an in-depth exploration of attempts by opponents of transgender constitutional equality to give new life to the 1974 case of Geduldig v. Aiello, which held that pregnancy discrimination is not categorically and facially sex discrimination, in the context of transgender rights.
Other works which were a part of the basis for selecting Professor Eyer for the honor related to her work on progressive textualism include Disaggregating Textualism and Originalism (published last year in ConLawNow), and Textualism and Progressive Social Movements (under submission). Both of these essays are part of a longer-term project in which Professor Eyer is making the case for why textualism should not be viewed as an approach that is exclusively conservative in nature, and that it indeed furthers important normative goals.
“I am honored and delighted to have been selected for the Lastowka award for a second time,” she said. “It is an especial honor to be honored alongside my Newark colleague, Christina Ho, who has been doing such excellent and prolific work.”