Vicki W. Girard is the Founding Co-Director with Yael Cannon of the Georgetown University Health Justice Alliance and a Professor of Law, Legal Practice. The Health Justice Alliance is a cross-campus collaborative engaging in research, service, and academic efforts focused on training the next generation of attorneys, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to work together to improve social determinants of health for marginalized communities. Professor Girard works closely with Georgetown University Medical Center and its partners at MedStar Health as they seek innovative ways to help patients with health-harming legal needs.

Professor Girard is a magna cum laude graduate of the Law Center. Prior to joining the faculty to teach in the first year legal writing program, she worked at several D.C. firms where she developed a specialty in food and drug law. Her interest in the intersections between law and medicine eventually led her to the medical-legal partnership (MLP) model of healthcare, which adds lawyers to the healthcare treatment team to address legal issues that contribute to health disparities at the individual, systems, and policy levels. Her passion for health justice and desire to contribute to the national MLP movement precipitated her efforts to bring this innovative service and learning approach to Georgetown.

Scholarship

Contributions to Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals

Vicki W. Girard, Yael Z. Cannon, Deborah F. Perry & Eileen S. Moore, Leveraging Academic-Medical Legal Partnerships to Advance Health Justice, 51 J.L. Med. & Ethics 798-809 (2023). [WWW] [W]
Loral Patchen, Roxana Richardson, Asli McCullers & Vicki W. Girard, Integrating Lawyers Into Perinatal Care Teams to Address Unmet, Health-Harming Legal Needs, 142 Obstetrics & Gynecol. 1310-1315 (2023). [WWW]
Katherine K. Kraschel, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Z. Cannon, Vicki W. Girard, Abbe R. Gluck, Jennifer L. Huer & Medha D. Makhlouf, Introduction: Medical-Legal Partnerships: Equity, Evolution, and Evaluation, 51 J.L. Med. & Ethics 732-734 (2023). [W]

Selected Contributions to Other Publications

Prashasti Bhatnagar, Rabiyah Abdus-Salaam, Sonia Canzater, Victoria Efetevbia, Raven Freeborn, Vicki W. Girard, Aza Nedhari, Deborah F. Perry, Erin Snowden, et al., Housing Justice Is Reproductive Justice: A Review of Housing Justice as a Structural Determinant of Black Women and Birthing People’s Reproductive Health in Washington, DC (Mamatoto Village & Georgetown University Health Justice Alliance, Mar. 2024). [WWW]
Kate M. Gallen, Michael J. Smith, Joshua Crane, Carly Loughran, Kirsten Schuster, Jake Sonnenberg, Mildred Reese, Vicki W. Girard, Ji Seon Song & Erin C. Hall, Law Enforcement and Patient Privacy Among Survivors of Violence: A Nationwide Mixed-Methods Study, 283 J. Surgical Res. 648-657 (2023).