Making the Best of Semen

Prospects for Law and Regulation

Anita Bernstein

$80.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

New York University Press
02 December 2025

Family law; Public health & safety law; Public health & preventive medicine

Series: Families, Law, and Society

Argues that regulation of the substance that creates life and spreads harm is crucial in a post-Roe America

Controls on sexual reproduction are so familiar. Check out any authority over human lives – religious, medical, sociopolitical, familial, psychological – and you'll find teachings about what people must, shouldn't, may, and may not do with their reproductive organs. In this landscape of control, one active participant has been escaping its share of deserved attention. Semen is the quintessential hazardous substance, a fluid that delivers unique benefit along with unique risk, but until now nobody has set out to control it.

In Making the Best of Semen Anita Bernstein sets out to manage a significant fluid that calls for much more attention that it receives. The benefits and harms that semen delivers when it travels onto mucosa are not only extraordinary: they also lie within the reach of regulation. Bernstein lays out the problem of unmentionability that shields semen from controls and documents the upheavals for which this substance is responsible. As the first book to broach regulation of semen, Making the Best of Semen focuses on the rendering of good things that semen regulation could furnish.

By: Anita Bernstein
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781479832910
ISBN 10: 147983291X
Series: Families, Law, and Society
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 02 December 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Anita Bernstein is Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and the author of many books, including Questions and Answers: Torts, now in its third edition, The Common Law Inside the Female Body, and Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status.

Reviews for Making the Best of Semen: Prospects for Law and Regulation

""From Genesis Chapter 38 to fertility fraud, this book details law and society's strange enduring relationship with what she calls the ""unmentionable"" semen. Bernstein has written the rare book that is personal and scholarly, provocative and at times laugh-out-loud funny.""--I. Glenn Cohen, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, Harvard Law School