Introducing our 2016 Summer Student Bloggers

The Petrie-Flom Center is pleased to welcome Kelly Dhru and Shailin Thomas to Bill of Health as our 2016 Summer Student Bloggers!

Kelly Dhru - photo1 (2)Kelly Amal Dhru is an incoming LLM student at the Harvard Law School, and a 2016-17 Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellow in Public Health Law and Bioethics from India. Previously, Kelly has completed her BCL (Distinction) and MPhil in Law from University College, University of Oxford, where thesis focused on the gap between rights and duties in the context of laws preventing cruelty to animals. Kelly holds a law degree from Gujarat National Law University, and has been the Research Director at Research Foundation for Governance in India, where she has been involved in drafting laws relating to public health, bioethics and human rights. Kelly has been a research assistant for Public Health Law at King’s College London, taught the Law of Tort, Jurisprudence and Bioethics at the University of Oxford, and Ethics and Philosophy at Ahmedabad University in India. She is a co-founder and storywriter for Lawtoons: a comic series on laws and rights, and been involved spreading awareness about public health and human rights through the use of street theatre.

Thomas Shailin PhotoShailin Thomas is a second year law student in a joint MD/JD program between Harvard Law School and the New York University School of Medicine.  He received a B.S. from Yale University, where he studied cognitive neuroscience — exploring the anatomy and physiology underlying social phenomena.  His interests lie at the intersection of clinical medicine and the legal forces that shape it.  Prior to law school, Shailin worked on both the administrative and clinical sides of health care, and as a research associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  He is currently an affiliate of the Berkman Center and Outreach Editor for the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology.  A fervent proponent of privacy and freedom of expression, Shailin has also served on the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.

Introducing Guest Blogger John Tingle

Editor’s Note, June 2016: Thanks to John’s many contributions, he is now a Regular Contributor.

John TingleJohn Tingle is joining Bill of Health as a guest contributor. John’s main area of focus will be on what is happening in the UK in the areas of patient safety, clinical negligence litigation and complaints in health care. Policy documents issued in these areas by various governmental health bodies, NGOs and international health organisations such as WHO will be discussed. He will also be taking a comparative perspective and will be exploring the policies and publications of other countries on these issues. Issues such as human rights in healthcare, medical and nursing accountability, hospital transparency, governance and accountability are also key concepts for discussion.

John is Reader in Health Law at Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University in the UK. He has a fortnightly magazine column in the British Journal of Nursing where he focusses on patient safety and the legal aspects of nursing and medicine. John teaches Tort and Medical Law on the LLB at Nottingham Trent and Patient Safety on the LLM in Health Law and Ethics. Read More

Introducing NPRM Symposium Blogger Govind Persad

GPersad 8-23-12Govind Persad will contribute to Bill of Health’s symposium on the 2015 notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on human subjects regulations.

Govind is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University and will be an Assistant Professor (beginning 2016) in the Department of Health Policy and Management and Berman Center for Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. His research is at the intersection of political philosophy, applied ethics, and health law.

Govind has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a JD/PhD from Stanford, where he was a student fellow at Stanford’s Center on Law and Biosciences; he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Department of Bioethics, National Institutes of Health.

Representative publications:

Introducing Blogger Robert Kinscherff

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The Petrie-Flom Center is pleased to welcome Robert Kinscherff, PhD, JD to the Bill of Health as our newest contributor!

Robert Kinscherff is the 2015-2016 Senior Fellow in Law and Neuroscience at the Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience, a collaboration between the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Petrie-Flom Center. Dr. Kinscherff is a forensic and clinical psychologist and an attorney who has been on the faculty at William James College since 1999, where he is Associate Vice President for Community Engagement with oversight of key clinical service-providing programs. He is also Teaching Faculty in the Doctoral Clinical Psychology Program and for the Doctoral School Psychology Program at William James College, Faculty at the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior, and Senior Associate for the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice. He is a member of the Massachusetts legislative Special Commission on Sexual Offender Recidivism and designee member for the Administrative Office of the Juvenile Court for the legislative Committee to Develop an Evaluation Process in Cases of Homicide by Juveniles. Kinscherff has previously served as Assistant Commissioner for Forensic Mental Health (MA Department of Mental Health), Director of Juvenile Court Clinic Services (MA Trial Court), and Director of Adult Forensic Services (Psychiatry and Law Program, MGH). For over a decade, he taught classes at the intersection of law and psychology at Boston University Law School. For the American Psychological Association, he is a current member of the Board of Professional Affairs, and has served as Chair of the APA Gun Violence Policy Review Task Force, a past two-term Chair of the Ethics Committee (EC), Chair of the Committee on Legal Issues (COLI) and Member of the Committee on Professional Practices and Standards (COPPS). His research and professional practice areas include legal, ethical, and professional practice issues in clinical and forensic mental health practice, violence risk assessment and management, juvenile homicide, aggressive and sexually problematic behaviors among youth and adults with developmental or mental disorders, and severe and unusual forms of child maltreatment. His many publications include the co-authored book APA Ethics Code: Commentary and Case Illustrations (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, 2009) and more recent publications on topics including mental health practice in juvenile justice contexts, special ethical and practice considerations in work with juvenile and violent offenders, and international human rights law implications for forensic psychologists of the 2012 US Supreme Court case of Miller v. Alabama regarding mandatory life imprisonment without possibility of parole for offenses committed as a juvenile.

Introducing New Blogger Peng Zhao

Zhao_peopleThe Petrie-Flom Center is pleased to welcome Visiting Scholar Peng Zhao to the Bill of Health as our newest contributor, who will blog primarily about China’s drug and food law and regulatory policy.

Peng Zhao earned his BA (2003), MA (2009), and PhD (2009) in law from the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL, Beijing). He serves as associate professor of law and vice director of the Center for Government Reform and Development at CUPL. Peng’s research and teaching interests include food law, administrative law, and risk regulation theory. He has authored more than a dozen articles on food law and risk regulation theory, and is now presiding over two research projects sponsored by the Chinese central government on these two fields. Peng is a director and member of the Chinese Association of Administrative Law, and deputy secretary general of a committee affiliated with this organization which focuses on legal issues on governmental regulation. Peng has also participated actively in professional service activities. He had served as member of an expert commission for the National Health and Family Planning Commission on amendments to Chinese Food Safety Law, and currently is serving as advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology on amendments to Chinese regulation of laboratory animal management. In addition, Peng was recently recognized by CUPL students as one of the Top Ten Popular Teachers at CUPL from 2013 to 2015.  Read More

Introducing the Harvard Health Law Society

10689774_809751895714130_4010610321675415773_nThe Harvard Health Law Society (HHLS) is a student organization at Harvard Law School, dedicated to exploring issues at the intersection of health and law while connecting students and experts for active engagement. It is made up of students at Harvard Law, as well as other Harvard students, interested in health policy, health care law, biotechnology, bioethics, health and human rights, and a range of other health and law topics.

We are excited to announce that, as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Petrie-Flom Center, members of the Health Law Society will be contributing bloggers this year. Our first two bloggers will be:

Matt Ryan photo_HLS

Matthew Ryan

HLS Class of 2017

 

 

 

HHLS Blogger Goerge Maliha

George Maliha

HLS Class of 2018

 

 

 

Welcome to Bill of Health, HHLS!

Introducing New Contributor Jessie Hill

jessie_hill_peopleJessie Hill is joining Bill of Health as a regular contributor.

Jessie Hill is the Judge Ben C. Green Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She teaches and writes in the fields of constitutional law, health law, and law and religion. Her scholarship has been published in the Michigan Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and the Texas Law Review, among others. Prior to teaching, Professor Hill worked at the Reproductive Freedom Project of the national ACLU office in New York, litigating challenges to state-law restrictions on reproductive rights, and then practiced First Amendment and civil rights law with a small law firm in Cleveland. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of Law Students for Reproductive Justice and is a frequent lecturer and consultant on reproductive rights issues.

Introducing NPRM Symposium Guest Blogger Zachary Schrag

Zachary Shrag 3Zachary M. Schrag, editor of the Institutional Review Blog, will contribute to Bill of Health’s symposium on the 2015 notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on human subjects regulations.

Zach is a professor of history at George Mason University. He has been involved with human subjects regulations’ impact on the humanities and social sciences since 2004, working as both an advocate and scholar.

Representative publications:

Introducing the 2015-2016 Petrie-Flom Student Fellows

The Petrie-Flom Center is pleased to welcome our new 2015-2016 Student Fellows. In the coming year, each fellow will pursue independent scholarly projects related to health law policy, biotechnology, and bioethics under the mentorship of Center faculty and fellows. They will also be regular contributors here at Bill of Health on issues related to their research. Read More

Introducing New Blogger Gregory Lipper

15.06.01, Lipper InformalGregory M. Lipper (@theglipper) is joining Bill of Health as a regular contributor.

Greg is Senior Litigation Counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He litigates a range of religious freedom cases at trial on appeal, often bringing First Amendment challenges to government promotion of religion. In addition, he currently represents a Notre Dame student intervening to oppose the university’s challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage regulations, and he prepared Americans United’s amicus brief, on behalf of nearly thirty religious organizations, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores.

Before joining Americans United, Greg spent six years at Covington & Burling, where his practice included trial and appellate litigation, white-collar criminal defense, and First Amendment advice. Read More