Category Archives: Introductions

Introducing New Blogger Leslie Francis

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We’re pleased to introduce Leslie P. Francis as a regular contributor to Bill of Health.

Professor Francis holds joint appointments at the University of Utah as Alfred C. Emery distinguished professor of law and distinguished professor of philosophy, and adjunct appointments in Family and Preventive Medicine (in the Division of Public Health), Internal Medicine (in the Division of Medical Ethics), and Political Science. Since 2012, she has also served the College of Law as Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development. Professor Francis received a B.A. from Wellesley College, where she graduated with high honors in philosophy and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received a Ph.D. in philosophy (1974) from the University of Michigan. After joining Utah’s philosophy faculty, she received her J.D. from the University of Utah (1981) and served as a law clerk to Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Appointed to the law faculty in 1982, she teaches and writes extensively in the areas of health law, bioethics, and disability. Professor Francis currently serves as a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, where she co-chairs the subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security; and as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR). Professor Francis also has been a member of the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee and of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging.

Representative Publications:

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Introducing Joanna Sax

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We’re excited to introduce and welcome Joanna Sax as a guest blogger for the month of May.

Joanna is an Associate Professor of Law at California Western School of Law.  She teaches Contracts, Trusts & Estates and a seminar entitled Law, Science & Medicine.  Her main area of research is biomedical policy; specifically, how to create incentives to advance scientific research and protect scientific integrity.  In this area, Joanna has recently focused on issues such as financial conflicts of interest and the relationship of politics and science.  Another area of interest is FDA regulation; Joanna will be presenting at the upcoming conference on the FDA in the 21st Century hosted by Petrie-Flom.  Prior to focusing her research interests on the intersection of law and science, she was a molecular biologist and spent years researching cancer.

Joanna attended the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she earned a B.S.  After undergraduate school, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute.  In 1999, following her fellowship, she began a PhD program in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  In 2003, after earning a PhD, she entered law school at the University of Pennsylvania.  After law school, she spent 2 and a half years as an attorney at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, LLP.  In 2009, Joanna joined the faculty at California Western School of Law.

Some of Joanna’s recent publications include:

Welcome, Joanna!

Introducing Adam Kolber

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We’re excited to introduce and welcome Adam Kolber to our blogging community. Professor Kolber will be guest blogging with us for the month of April.

Professor Kolber writes and teaches in the areas of health law, bioethics, criminal law, and neurolaw and is affiliated with Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Health, Science, and Public Policy and its Center for Law, Language & Cognition. In 2005, he created the Neuroethics & Law Blog and, in 2006, taught the first law school course devoted to law and neuroscience. He has also taught law and neuroscience topics to federal and state judges as part of a MacArthur Foundation grant. Professor Kolber has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and at NYU Law School’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice. His work has been frequently discussed in the media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Professor Kolber began his academic career on the faculty of the University of San Diego School of Law. Before that, he clerked for the Honorable Chester J. Straub of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. He graduated Order of the Coif from Stanford Law School, where he was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. Prior to law school, he was a business ethics consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Some of Professor Kolber’s representative publications:

Introducing Ryan Abbott

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Ryan Abbott, M.D., J.D., M.T.O.M., is Associate Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School. He has served as a consultant on health care financing and regulation, intellectual property, and public health for international organizations, academic institutions and private enterprises including the World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization and University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Abbott has published widely on issues associated with health care law and intellectual property protection in legal, medical, and scientific peer-reviewed journals.

Professor Abbott is a licensed physician, attorney, and acupuncturist. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Yale Law School, as well as a Summa Cum Laude graduate from Emperor’s College (MTOM) and a Summa Cum Laude graduate from University of California, Los Angeles (BS). Professor Abbott has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships, scholarships and awards, and has served as Principal Investigator of biomedical research studies at University of California. He is a registered patent attorney with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and a member of the California and New York State Bars.

Some of Dr. Abbott’s recent publications include: Continue reading →

Introducing Anup Malani

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We’re pleased to introduce and welcome Professor Anup Malani, who will be guest blogging with Bill of Health for the month of January.  Anup is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He is also a Professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, a University Fellow at Resources for the Future, Washington, D.C.; a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics and the Forum for Health Economics and Policy.

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Introducing Nikola Biller-Adorno

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We’re pleased to introduce and welcome Nikola Biller-Adorno to our blogging community as an occasional contributor.

Nikola  directs the Institute of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She has been deputy editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, and is the immediate past-president of the International Association of Bioethics. Currently, she is spending a year at Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine as a Commonwealth Fund/Careum Foundation sponsored Harkness Fellow, exploring ethical and policy issues of health care reform.

Some of Nikola’s representative works include:

Welcome, Nikola!

The Evolution of Public Health Law Research

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By: Scott Burris, JD

Law has been used to protect and promote public health from the early days of European colonization of North America. Quarantine statutes and orders are reported from the mid-17th century. The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, where our office is based, inspired the federal government’s first public health statute, authorizing relocation of the capital in the event of an outbreak.

By the mid-19th century, sanitarians like Boston’s own Lemuel Shattuck were articulating the idea that a considerable proportion of death and illness was preventable, and arguing that it was moral, feasible, and economical for the state to do the preventing. Law was a primary tool for prevention, and throughout the 19th century, and into the early twentieth, the extent and limitations of federal, state and local public health authority was litigated, debated in legislatures and defined in voluminous treatises by scholars like Freund, Tiedeman and Tobey.

And then, it got quiet.

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Meet the Editors – Glenn Cohen

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Welcome to our blog!  We just wanted to introduce ourselves as the editors and thank you for stopping by.  We hope you’ll do so often.

First, say hi to I. Glenn Cohen (igcohen at law dot harvard dot edu).

Glenn is Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School and Faculty Co-Director of the Petrie-Flom Center.  This year, he’s also a Radcliffe Institute fellow, and from 2012-2015, he will be a Greenwall Faculty Scholar.

Glenn is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, he has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world, and his work has been covered on PBS, NPR, ABC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the BostonGlobe, and several other media venues.

Glenn’s current projects relate to reproduction/reproductive technology and to medical tourism – the travel of patients who are residents of one country, the “home country,” to another country, the “destination country,” for medical treatment. His past work has included projects on end of life decision-making, FDA regulation, research ethics, and commodification.  His award-winning academic work has appeared in the journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Stanford, Southern California, Georgetown Cornell, Minnesota, Iowa, and Hastings Law Reviews, the Harvard Journal of Law and Negotiation, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Food and Drug Law Journal, the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, the American Journal of Public Health, and the Hastings Center Report.  He is the editor of “The Globalization of Healthcare: Legal and Ethical Challenges” (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming 2012), and is currently working on writing a new book “Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Ethics, and Law”.

Prior to joining the HLS faculty, Glenn served as a clerk to Chief Judge Michael Boudin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He also served as an appellate attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate staff, where he acted as lead counsel in over 12 Circuit Court cases and represented the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court, in conjunction with the Solicitor General’s office. Immediately before joining the faculty he was a fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center.

Some of Glenn’s representative work includes:

Meet the Editors – Holly Fernandez Lynch

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Next, meet Holly Fernandez Lynch (hlynch at law dot harvard dot edu).

Holly is the Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center, where she was previously an academic fellow. Her scholarly work focuses on the ethics of human subjects research and issues at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship, such as conflicts of conscience in health care. Holly practiced pharmaceuticals law at Hogan & Hartson, LLP in Washington, DC (now Hogan Lovells), and worked as a bioethicist in the Human Subjects Protection Branch at NIH’s Division of AIDS. She also served as Senior Policy and Research Analyst for President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Holly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and earned her Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  She is currently an IRB member at The Fenway Institute in Boston.

Some of Holly’s representative work includes:

Introducing Our Collaborators

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Bill of Health is lucky to have lined up a few really great institutional collaborators.  Let’s meet them:

First, HealthLawProf Blog will be cross-posting its material on our site, helping Bill of Health achieve its goal of becoming a true one-stop-shop for news and commentary in health law, biotech, and bioethics.

Second, the folks at the Public Health Law Research Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (headed up by Temple’s Scott Burris) will be providing regular updates on their great work in empirical public health law.  You can also follow them on:

And last but not least, Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, which puts together a stellar weekly round-up of recently published bioethics scholarship, op-eds, news items, etc. will be allowing us to post a version of that round-up here.  Check for it on Friday afternoons.

If you’re interested in pursuing an institutional collaboration, please let us know.  Contact Holly Fernandez Lynch, hlynch at law dot harvard dot edu.