Paul A. Lombardo

Paul A. Lombardo is Professor of Law at Georgia State University's College of Law. As a member of the core faculty at the Center for Law, Health and Society, he teaches courses in Genetics and the Law, the History of Bioethics, Mental Health Law and the Legal Regulation of Human Research. He has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics. He is coeditor of Fletcher's Clinical Ethics, (3^rd ed.) and his book Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008.

Lombardo has been a consultant and participated in Study Sections of six different Institutes of the National Institutes of Health, served as a committee member for the Institute of Medicine and was a charter member of the Central Beryllium Institutional Review Board of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Professor Lombardo served on the Editorial Advisory Panel at the Cold Spring Harbor (NY) Laboratory's DNA Learning Center that assembled the digital Image Archive on American Eugenics Movement, and a consultant and contributor to DNA Interactive: Chronicle, a website that explores the history of eugenics alongside the history of genetics.

He was a contributor and consultant for the US Memorial Holocaust Museum Exhibit, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. In 2002, he sponsored an historical marker correcting the historical record concerning the Supreme Court's infamous decision in the 1927 eugenical sterilization case of Buck v. Bell. His advocacy for state governmental repudiation of past eugenic policies was successful first in Virginia and has extended to six other states: Oregon, North and South Carolina, California, Georgia and Indiana. He is a Co-Principal Investigator on an NIH-Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Grant that has included a symposium, public events and a second historical marker on eugenic history, erected to mark the Centennial of Indiana's 1907 eugenical sterilization law, the first such law in the world. He is editing a volume of essays from that symposium tentatively entitled: Eugenic Centennial: From the "Indiana Experiment" to the Human Genome.

Lombardo has been a historical consultant for several films, including, The Lynchburg Story (Discovery Channel, 1993), Race: the Power of an Illusion Part I, "The Difference Between Us" (PBS, April 2003) and most recently, The Golden Door (presented by Martin Scorsese/ Miramax, 2006) a feature film released in the U.S. in 2007 that explored the impact of eugenic screening on early 20th Century immigrants at Ellis Island.

From 1985-1990 Lombardo practiced law in California. From 1990 until 2006 he served on the faculty of the Schools of Law and Medicine at the University of Virginia, where he directed the Center for Mental Health Law at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy and the Program in Law and Medicine at the Center for Biomedical Ethics. In 1997 he drafted Virginia's Patient Health Records Privacy Act. His has lectured at dozens of colleges and Universities in the U.S. and Canada; in 2004, he was a Visiting Professor at Aga Khan University, in Karachi, Pakistan. Lombardo received his A.B. from Rockhurst College ( Kansas City, Mo.), his M.A. from Loyola University of Chicago and both his Ph.D. and J.D. from the University of Virginia.