Lawrence O. Gostin

Lawrence Oglethorpe Gostin is an American law professor who specializes in public health law. He is best known as the author of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and as a prolific contributor to journals on medicine and law.

He received his B.A. in psychology from the State University of New York at Brockport in 1971 and his J.D. from Duke University in 1974. He was an adjunct professor at Harvard University from 1986 to 1994 and is (as of 2007) a professor of law at Georgetown University's Law Center and a professor of law and public health at Johns Hopkins University's School of Hygiene and Public Health.

From 1986 to 1994, Gostin was executive director of the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Bioethics. He worked on Hillary Clinton's health plan, serving as chairman of the health information privacy and public health committees of the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform. In the 1990s he was executive director of the National Council on Civil Liberties, the British equivalent of the ACLU.

His proposed Model State Emergency Health Powers Act ignited a firestorm of controversy across the ideological spectrum, from Phyllis Schlafly to LAMBDA, for being overly broad and ripe for abuse.

External links

* [http://www.publichealthlaw.net/About/AboutPDFs/GostinCV.pdf Gostin's 38 page CV with a full bibliography of his published writings]
* [http://www.publichealthlaw.net/ The Center for Law and the Public's Health site]