Glenn Cohen

Harvard Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03 and Gideon A. Schor ’89 recently filed an amicus brief on behalf of Dr. Eric S. Lander in a pending Supreme Court case that will address whether human genes are patentable.

The past year was a historic one for health law, with the Supreme Court issuing the final word on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act alongside a host of other critical developments. In February, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, in partnership with the New England Journal of Medicine, held its first annual Health Law Year in P/Review event.

Following a vote of the Harvard Law School faculty, I. Glenn Cohen, a leading expert on the intersection of health care, bioethics and the law, will be promoted from assistant professor to tenured professor of law, effective July 1. Cohen has served as an assistant professor since 2008, and as co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics since 2009.

A group of scholars gathered on Jan. 17 at Harvard Law School with Peter Barton Hutt ’59 to discuss and celebrate his career, including “20 years (thus far)” teaching an influential course at Harvard Law on food and drug law. Hutt, who has worked at the Washington, D.C. law firm Covington & Burling for more than five decades, has taught the course at HLS since 1993.

“Medical tourism—the travel of patients who are residents of one country (the ‘home country’) to another country for medical treatment (the ‘destination country’)—represents a growing and important business," writes Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03 in a recent article.

The intersection of medical tourism and ethical and legal questions are at the heart of I. Glenn Cohen's new book, “Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics,” the focus of his year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The Greenwall Foundation has chosen Harvard Law School Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen '03, a leading expert on the intersection of bioethics and the law, to receive one of three Faculty Scholar Awards in Bioethics. The award allows recipients to conduct extensive independent research to help set public policy and standards of clinical practice.  

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has selected Harvard Law School Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen '03 to be a Radcliffe Institute fellow for the 2012–2013 academic year. Cohen is among the 51 women and men who will pursue independent projects in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences within the rich, multidisciplinary community.

The Supreme Court opened its review of the national health-care overhaul on Mar. 26, the first of three days of oral arguments on the 2010 law. In light of the historic arguments, law schools professors at HLS and elsewhere in the Boston area have incorporated the debate into their classrooms, and, In the media, HLS Professors I. Glenn Cohen. Einer Elhauge, Noah Feldman, Charles Fried and Laurence Tribe weighed in on the case.

On Feb. 1, the Harvard Law School Federalist Society sponsored a debate on the philosophical and legal issues surrounding the field of embryonic research. The event, “Embryo Ethics and the Law,” featured Christopher Tollefsen, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, and HLS Assistant Professor Glenn Cohen, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

On Feb. 2, in a panel discussion at Harvard Law School titled “Are Law Schools in Crisis? The New York Times Editorial and its Discontents,” three law professors addressed questions brought up by two pieces that appeared recently in the Times claiming that law schools are in a state of “crisis.”

Harvard Law School Assistant Professor of Law I. Glenn Cohen, co-director of HLS’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, is the author of three recently published articles on health law topics.

Harvard Law School Assistant Professor of Law I. Glenn Cohen joined medical and legal experts live via Skype on Oct. 25 at Mississippi College School of Law to debate the implications of Mississippi’s Personhood initiative, which will appear on the state’s ballot Nov. 8. The initiative asks: “Should the term 'person' be defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof?”

On May 20 through 21, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School convened an international, multidisciplinary conference providing legal and ethical analysis of one of the broadest reaching developments in health care of the last 20 years: its globalization.

The United States cannot afford to allow ongoing legal ambiguities to compromise the vast potential of stem-cell research, yet the struggle over federal funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells may well be waged for years to come, write Harvard Law School Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen and Dr. Eli Y. Adashi in an article published by the New England Journal of Medicine on May 18.

In his essays, Samuel Moyn considers topics such as human rights and the Holocaust, international courts, and liberal internationalism. Skeptical of humanitarian justifications for intervention, he writes,“[H]uman rights history should turn away from ransacking the past as if it provided good support for the astonishingly specific international movement of the last few decades.”

Glenn Cohen, Assistant Professor of Law and co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, addressed health care professionals as a guest speaker at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s 66th annual meeting, as part of the Ken Ryan Ethics Symposium - Cross-Border Care, on Oct. 25 in Denver, Colo.

I. Glenn Cohen, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health and Law Policy and assistant professor of Harvard Law School, was a guest on the radio program “The Takeaway,” a national morning news program produced in partnership with The New York Times, the BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston.

Academics from the fields of law, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and economics convened at Harvard Law School April 15 and 16 to discuss the moral and…

Founded five years ago as a think tank to respond to the need for leading legal scholarship at the intersection of medicine, science, and law, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School tackles a wide range of issues, bringing together top scholars from a variety of fields in an interdisciplinary approach to some of the thorniest problems faced by society today.