Lawrence O. Gostin

Lawrence O. Gostin, an internationally acclaimed scholar, is the Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Gostin is also Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Center for Law & the Public’s Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities - a Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Professor Gostin is Visiting Professor of Public Health (Faculty of Medical Sciences) and Research Fellow (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) at Oxford University, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Public Health. He is the Health Law and Ethics Editor and Contributing Writer for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Professor Gostin has two honorary degrees. In 1994, the Chancellor of the State University of New York conferred an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree. In 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Vice Chancellor awarded Cardiff University’s (Wales) highest honor, an Honorary Fellow.

Professor Gostin, an elected lifetime Member of the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences, serves on the Board on Health Sciences Policy and the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. He currently chairs the IOM Committee on Health Informational Privacy, and has chaired Committees on genomics and on prisoner research. The IOM awarded Dean Gostin the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal for distinguished service to further its mission of science and health.

He received the Public Health Law Association’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of a career devoted to using law to improve the public’s health, presented at the CDC. Internationally, Dean Gostin received the Rosemary Delbridge Memorial Award from the National Consumer Council (U.K.) for the person “who has most influenced Parliament and government to act for the welfare of society.” He also received the Key to Tohoko University (Japan) for distinguished contributions to human rights in mental health.

Professor Gostin has led major law reform initiatives in the U.S., including the drafting of the Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA) to combat bioterrorism and the “Turning Point” Model State Public Health Act. He is also leading a drafting team on developing a Model Public Health Law for the World Health Organization.

In the United Kingdom, Professor Gostin was the Legal Director of the National Association for Mental Health, Director of the National Council of Civil Liberties (the UK equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union), and a Fellow at Oxford University. He helped draft the current Mental Health Act (England and Wales) and brought several landmark cases before the European Commission and Court of Human Rights.

Professor Gostin’s latest books are: Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (University of California Press and Milbank Memorial Fund, 2nd ed., 2008); Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2007); The AIDS Pandemic: Complacency, Injustice, and Unfulfilled Expectations (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); The Human Rights of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities: Different But Equal (Oxford University Press, 2003); Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader (University of California Press and Milbank Memorial Fund, 2002).