Jody Madeira joined the Indiana Law faculty in 2007. She is an internationally recognized expert in fertility fraud, bioethics, and law and medicine, with a focus on reproductive endocrinology. Her research has received profiled in national and international media, including the Netflix documentary “Our Father” (2022) to TED to investigative news programs like “20/20” (2019). Her research interests involve empirical research; the role of emotion in law; the sociology of law; law, medicine, and bioethics; and the Second Amendment.
Madeira is the author, coauthor, or editor of dozens of scholarly articles and three published book and two forthcoming titles, including the forthcoming Indiana Personal Injury Law Treatise (forthcoming 2023) and a forthcoming casebook, The Second Amendment: Gun Rights and Regulation (co-edited with Jacob D. Charles, Joseph Blocher, and Darrell Miller) (Foundation Press, forthcoming)
Most recently, she co-edited The Edward Elgar Research Handbook of Law and Emotion (Edward Elgar, 2021).
Her second book, Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception (University of California Press, 2018), takes readers inside the infertility experience, from dealing with infertility-related emotions to forming treatment relationships with medical professionals, confronting difficult decisions, and negotiating informed consent. Based on a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data (130 patient interviews, 83 interviews with reproductive medical professionals, and 267 patient surveys), Madeira investigates how women, men, and their care providers can utilize trust to collaboratively negotiate infertility’s personal, physical, spiritual, ethical, medical, and legal minefields.
Madeira’s first book, Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, applies collective memory to criminal prosecution and sentencing, exploring the ways in which victims' families and survivors came to comprehend and cope with the Oklahoma City bombing through membership in community groups as well as through attending and participating in Timothy McVeigh's trial and execution.
Madeira also specializes in assessing how multimedia technology can improve patient education and decision making. She is principal investigator on a grant (with Dr. Basia Andraka-Christou) to design and implement S.U.N., a multimedia web portal integrating educational videos and a mobile health tracking application for college students that addresses alcohol, marijuana, opioid, and stimulant use disorders. In addition, she is involved in assessing the efficacy of commercially available applications in reproductive medicine, gastroenterology, and other areas of medical practice.
Finally, Madeira is currently involved in a research project assessing how Americans talk about firearms and associated benefits, risks, rights, and regulations, especially how doctor-patient discussions of firearm ownership and access impact treatment relationships and the provision of medical care across practice fields. In prior publications, Madeira has investigated a wide variety of topics, including the effects of legal proceedings, verdicts, and sentences upon victims' families; the role of empathy in personal injury litigation; law and semiotics; and the impact of recent developments in capital victims' services upon the relationship between victims' families and the criminal justice system.
After graduating from law school and completing her Ph.D. coursework, Professor Madeira clerked for the Hon. Richard D. Cudahy at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She then came to Harvard as a Climenko Fellow and lecturer in law, where she taught legal research and writing as well as a seminar on the cultural life of capital punishment. Madeira also recently served as a research associate at the Capital Punishment Research Initiative at the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State University of New York.