Session 1: Eugenics as a Coordinated System. By Preeti Juturu

Session Objectives:

By the end of Session #1, students will be able to:

1. Be able to describe eugenics as a multi-institutional framework, outlining how legal, medical, scientific, and cultural systems contributed to shared definitions of “fitness,” “unfitness,” and social value.

2. Identify how authority and decision-making were distributed across institutions, including who held the power to classify, regulate, or intervene in people’s lives and bodies.

3. Examine how ideas about heredity, health, and risk were operationalized, tracing how these concepts informed institutional practices, policies, and routines.

4. Explain how healthcare, law, science, and public culture interacted to shape approaches to disability, reproduction, and social inclusion.

This Module Draws from: The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility 

• The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility brings together six cutting-edge essays that expose how legal systems—through incarceration, detention, disability law, tort doctrine, and human subjects research—profoundly shape health outcomes and perpetuate structural inequality. From forced sterilizations in prisons to the hidden burdens of self-accommodation, the authors reveal how law can both cause and conceal harm, especially among marginalized populations. Blending bioethics, legal history, disability studies, and public health, this volume challenges readers to rethink what justice and autonomy mean in environments defined by surveillance, stigma, and institutional neglect—and calls for bold legal and structural reforms to achieve genuine health equity.

• Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96j9n0nj