About the Author

This site is no longer being updated; access to material contained here is for archival purposes only. Please see the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Law for current information on health concerns facing the world.

Lawrence O. Gostin, J.D., LL.D. (Hon.) is Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also Director of the Center for Law & the Public’s Health, CDC’S Collaborating Center Promoting Health Through Law.

An internationally renown scholar, Professor Gostin has devoted his career to promoting human rights and the public’s health and is responsible for several major law reforms in the United States and the United Kingdom. Most recently he led the drafting of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act to combat bioterrorism and other emerging public health threats.

Professor Gostin is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and serves on its Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, the Institutional Review Board, and expert study committees, including the IOM Committee on Assuring the Health of the Public in the 21st Century. He is also a Fellow of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Hastings Center. He works closely with national and international public health agencies, including the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Professor Gostin is the Health Law and Ethics Editor of JAMA.

In the United Kingdom, while head of the National Council of Civil Liberties, Professor Gostin received the Rosemary Delbridge Memorial Award for the person “who has most influenced Parliament and government to act for the welfare of society.”