Lewis Grossman

Lewis A. Grossman is the Ann Loeb Bronfman Professor of Law at American University. He has also been a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University and a Visiting Professor at Cornell Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of food and drug law, health law, American legal history, and civil procedure. Before entering academia, Professor Grossman was an associate at Covington & Burling LLP, where he currently serves as part-time Of Counsel. He also clerked for Chief Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Professor Grossman is the author of Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America (Oxford University Press 2021) and co-author of Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials, the leading text in the field. His scholarship has appeared in numerous academic journals, including Science; New England Journal of Medicine; Cornell Law Review; Iowa Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics American Journal of Law & Medicine; Administrative Law Review; and Law & History Review, among others. He is currently at work on a book tentatively titled Apricot Rebellion: Laetrile and the Dethroning of American Medicine in the 1970s.

Professor Grossman has served on five committees of the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He has recently filed amicus briefs on behalf of a national group of leading Food and Drug Law Scholars in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court defending FDA’s approval and regulation of the abortion medication mifepristone. He speaks frequently in legal, medical, and multidisciplinary forums on a wide variety of issues related to food and drug regulation and the history of American medical regulation. Most recently, his presentations have focused on Americans’ historical mistrust of the medical establishment, psychedelic therapies, reproductive rights, and transgender care.

Professor Grossman earned his Ph.D. in History from Yale University, which he attended on a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and where he was awarded the George Washington Egleston Prize for Best Dissertation in the Field of American History. He received a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University.