Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Lectures and Events
An Education in Health Law
Why would law students hurry to a crowded lecture every week to hear discussions on health-related topics such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, drug labeling and obesity? Because distinguished members of the national and international community were coming to Georgetown Law to discuss some of the most critical national and global health law issues of our time.
The weekly lectures, offered from September 9 to December 2, were part of a semester-long colloquium sponsored by the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Students could attend the lectures as a full-credit class — with papers to write — or they could simply attend as part of the Georgetown Law community. The colloquium was led by Lawrence Gostin, the Linda and Timothy O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law and faculty director of the O’Neill Institute, and former O’Neill Institute Executive Director John Monahan (C’83, L’87); fellows Susan Kim and Paula O’Brien assisted in the effort.
An inaugural lecture on September 9 featured a talk on global health and infectious diseases by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci noted that 20th-century advances in germ theory, vaccines and sanitation led some scholars in the 1960s to predict the virtual end of infectious disease — right at the time when Fauci was beginning a fellowship on the subject at the National Institutes of Health.
“It was like somebody telling you that from now on, there’s going to be no law,” Fauci said to the crowd of law students — adding that, contrary to the predictions, infectious disease continues to be a significant problem across the globe.
On October 28, Ambassador Mark Dybul (C’85, M’92, H’08), then U.S. global AIDS coordinator who led the implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, discussed the global AIDS pandemic as well as PEPFAR, the largest international health initiative in history. Dybul recently joined the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria as senior adviser and became a distinguished scholar at the O’Neill Institute.
Other colloquium events featured Georgetown Law Professors David Vladeck, John R. Thomas, Tim Westmoreland, Gregg Bloche, Angela Campbell, Wendy Collins Perdue and Jacqueline Scott, who teamed up with experts in the community to discuss topics ranging from intellectual property issues surrounding vaccines to legal solutions in health reform. At a November 18 event, for example, Perdue examined the ways in which the government contributes to the nation’s obesity problem — through zoning laws, no less.
Other panels looked at issues as far reaching as the health of the global workforce, international health assistance, and the ways in which lawyers advance the public health. An all-day symposium sponsored by the O’Neill Institute on November 12 examined “The Role of Science in Advancing Health Diplomacy.” Another Institute initiative on October 25 paired law students with microbiology students on Georgetown’s main campus, staging a mock pandemic flu crisis. The exercise helped to explore the potential responses by government and health officials in the event of an emergency.
The primary goal, Gostin said, “is to enable a group of students who are taking the colloquium to be educated in a variety of topics in national and global health — and also for the wider Georgetown community to get to hear some of the most influential speakers in Washington and the nation.”
