August 2, 2011

ATLANTA - Professor Leslie Wolf returned to her alma mater, Harvard Law School, to speak at a conference on the legal and ethical challenges resulting from globalization of healthcare. The conference was sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. 

Wolf and her co-author, Aaron Levine, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, presented their paper "The Role and Responsibilities of Physicians in Patients’ Decisions about Unproven Stem Cell Therapies" at the conference. 

"I knew that Dr. Levine had been doing some interesting empirical work on patient experiences with traveling abroad to get unproven stem cell treatments," said Wolf.  "The conference was the perfect opportunity to collaborate and add a legal analysis of physicians’ legal and ethical obligations to his findings about what was actually happening between doctors and patients." 

The conference addressed a wide array of issues arising from an increasing global healthcare market, including the so-called "medical tourism" addressed in Wolf’s and Levine’s paper, public health issues across borders, and social justice issues arising from differential access to health care.

Wolf noted that the conference was held in the building where she had many law school classes, including criminal law, property, and constitutional law. "The flashbacks created a few butterflies," Wolf admitted, "even though I knew that I was not going to be called on."

A compilation of the papers presented at the conference will be published by Oxford University Press.

For more information about Wolf and other speakers at the conference, please see http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/petrie-flom/news/newsletters/aug11.pdf

Contact:
Amy Grover
Administrative Coordinator, Center for Law, Health & Society
404-413-9084