Teneille Brown
This semester, Professor Brown has presented her work at the Stanford Law and Biosciences workshop and the University of Seattle. She has just finished an article on the uplifting topic of how the legal system perpetuates false hope in cancer care. She also recently organized the law review’s symposium on psychiatric diagnoses and the law, and has written an article on the potential use of neuroscience and genetic data in forensic psychiatry. Next semester she will be co-teaching an interdisciplinary class with Professor Leslie Francis entitled “Health Law for Non-Lawyers.” The class is open to medical, nursing and pharmacy students.
Jorge Contreras
This semester, Professor Contreras has continued an active program of writing and speaking about intellectual property, standards development and scientific data. His article describing an innovative public-private approach to identifying genetic markers for adverse drug reactions (co-authored with A. Holden, M. Nelson and S. John) appeared this month in Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery.
During the Fall semester of 2015, Professor Contreras appeared as an invited speaker at George Washington University, Washington University in St. Louis, Indiana University – Bloomington, University of Houston, Michigan State University, Lewis and Clark School of Law, University of Toronto, the Patent Office of Poland and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan). He also organized a public symposium in Washington, DC entitled the Future of Patent Remedies, co-sponsored by the University of Utah and American University, bringing together government, industry and academic perspectives on this timely topic.
Leslie Francis
Center Director Leslie Francis continues her scholarship in the areas of disability, health privacy, and philosophy of law, among her many areas of interest. With Michael Stein, Anita Silvers, and Bradley Areheart, she published “Accommodating Every Body” in the Chicago Law Review; the article argues for an approach to accommodations in terms of need or effectiveness rather than disability status. Francis also edited a special issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy on technology and new challenges for privacy; her contribution to the issue, co-authored with John Francis, was “Privacy, Confidentiality, and Justice.” She has also published articles this year on disability and end of life decision-making, on obligations to trafficking victims based on problematic law enforcement, and on adolescents and rights to health information. Works in progress include a book on surveillance and public health (with John Francis) and editing the Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics.
In April, Professor Francis was elected President-elect of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, the highest academic honor of that organization. She continues to serve as an elected vice-president of the International Society for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, as a member of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and as Chair of the Board of Utah’s And Justice for All. Although her term as co-chair of the Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security sub-committee of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics ended December 1st, she continues to serve NCVHS as a member of their subcommittee on data access and use.
Amelia Rinehart
This semester, Professor Rinehart presented her recent scholarly work, Myriad Lessons Learned, at The Meaning of Myriad, a symposium sponsored by the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, to explore the various implications of Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the 2013 Supreme Court case declaring human genes not eligible for patenting. In addition to this and other ongoing scholarship related to the public interest in patents, Professor Rinehart also supervises our Center for Medical Innovation fellows to provide patent services to University of Utah graduate students participating in medical innovation competitions.