As health care continues to dominate the national conversation in the United States, we take a deep dive into the intersection of lawyers and health care and how they work together. Harvard Law School has been a leader in thinking through how to cross this professional divide, most notably through the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. Founded just over 20 years ago, the Petrie-Flom Center is a research institute situated at the intersection of health, ethics, technology, and the law. To understand the unique contributions of the Center and the field it helped substantiate, our lead story for this issue is a roundtable interview with three leaders central to Petrie-Flom’s growth and success:
- I. Glenn Cohen, the James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, deputy dean, and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School
- Carmel Shachar, assistant clinical professor of law and faculty director of the Health Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School; former executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center from 2017 to 2023
- Susannah Baruch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center
Shachar, who began as a student fellow before returning to become executive director, reflects on her more than 15 years with the Center and how it helps prepare students to work in the field: “Working in health law, because it’s a field that’s devoted to an industry as opposed to a particular legal methodology, often means being very creative and open to falling down new rabbit holes and to continually learning new areas of law.”
To explore these areas of legal practice further, in “Leading Legal at a Hospital,” we speak to two in-house leaders at major health care facilities: Laura Peabody, chief legal officer and general counsel at Mass General Brigham, and Jorge Lopez Jr., executive vice president and general counsel at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Both showcase the profound difficulty of trying to uplift the business of providing care while managing risk. As Peabody says, “We’re at a point now where the reimbursement that the providers get paid to take care of patients does not cover the cost of delivering the care,” she says. “You don’t have to be an economist to understand that that is not a winning formula.” For Peabody and Lopez, though, the mission keep them going.
In “Partnering for Patient Advocacy,” we highlight how medical-legal partnerships—MLPs—are providing innovative solutions for whole-person care by housing lawyers in hospitals or providing direct referrals to legal aid. By partnering with legal aid groups or law school clinics, hospitals around the United States are screening for social determinants of health in order to better tackle their patient populations’ problems, for instance, tenant-landlord protections in situations where the housing is exacerbating allergies or asthma. In speaking with clinical staff and lawyers that are part of MLPs at Cincinnati Children’s and Georgetown Law School, we highlight how an MLP can revolutionize legal aid.
“A lot of people think of the MLP as a revolution in health care, and it is,” says Yael Zakai Cannon, professor of law at Georgetown Law and director of the Health Justice Alliance Law Clinic. “But it’s also a complete innovation in how we approach access to justice” by getting to patients—or clients—before they’re in crisis.
We conclude this issue with an interview with Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who served as the 19th director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 to 2023. After a career learning how to collaborate with lawyers in the policy space, Dr. Walensky spent 2023 in residence at Harvard Law School as a fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center to learn from and impart wisdom to the law school community. She advocates for more cross-clinical collaboration, saying:
I think that we don’t know how to talk to one another. When I’m on clinical service, the ICU is my office. I can walk into an ICU and continue a casual conversation because it feels so normal to me in an otherwise serious, sad, hard place. And yet, I get nervous to walk into the classroom of a very formal wood-panel building at the law school. And I’m guessing vice versa for your law students in our space. I do think just entering the buildings and overcoming this discomfort makes a big difference. That means finding the right time to do it and making it easy.
