Lawrence Gostin


Lawrence Oglethorpe Gostin is an American law professor at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in global health law as well as the law of public health and human rights. Formerly a Fulbright Fellow, Gostin focuses on health law and holds appointments at Georgetown University, including as Distinguished University Professor, the university's highest faculty honor. He is the lead author of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and is a contributor to journals on medicine and law.

Early life and education

Lawrence Oglethorpe Gostin was born in New York City on October 19, 1949, the son of Joseph and Sylvia Gostin. He received a B.A. degree in psychology from the State University of New York at Brockport in 1971 and a J.D. from the Duke University School of Law in 1974. From 1974 to 1975, Gostin served as a Fulbright Fellow in psychiatry and law at the University of Oxford and the University of London.

Career

Following his Fulbright fellowship, Gostin remained in the United Kingdom and became the legal director of mental health charity Mind. There, he served as inaugural head of the charity's legal and welfare rights department and worked there until 1983. During his time at Mind, he was instrumental in the organization's campaign regarding reform of mental health legislation. According to Jennifer Brown, Gostin's writings on "new legalism" – a regulatory philosophy which combined protection of mental health patients' civil rights with entitlement to proper mental health treatment – was a large influence on the Mental Health Act 1983. Gostin himself estimated that two thirds of the act were based on proposals from Mind or from his writings. As legal director, Gostin also oversaw the filing of many test cases at the European Commission of Human Rights and European Court of Human Rights "highlighting the absence of possibilities for a legal review of detention for many."
From 1983 to 1985, Gostin was the general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties in the United Kingdom. From 1986 to 1994, he was executive director of the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics; during the period 1987 to 1988, he was also legislative counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy. In 1994, the State University of New York awarded Gostin a Doctor of Laws degree. He was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2000.
Additionally, from 1985 to 1994, Gostin was an adjunct faculty member in law and public health at Harvard University, where he also served under William J. Curran as the associate director of the World Health Organization collaborating center on health legislation from 1988 to 1994. After leaving Harvard, Gostin joined the faculty of Georgetown University in 1994.
In December 2001, Gostin released a draft of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, a legislation model backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intended to "increase state powers to respond to bioterrorism or other outbreaks of disease". Although Gostin, as lead author of the act, published an article supporting it in JAMA, the Model Act attracted criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, Institute for Health Freedom, and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, as well as scholars Jane Orient and George Annas, for being overly broad with a potential for abuse.
In 2007, Gostin was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. From 2010 to 2016, he served as the editor-in-chief of the MDPI journal Laws. He was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Sydney in 2012.
Gostin held a secondary appointment as a professor of law and public health at Johns Hopkins University from 1997 to 2013; from 1995 to 2010 he had directed the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Hopkins. In 2007, Gostin became the inaugural Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law. When the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown was founded in 2008, he became its director. In 2012, the president of Georgetown University named Gostin University Professor in honor of his "outstanding record of scholarly accomplishment". The O’Neill Institute was named a World Health Organization collaborating center on public health law and human rights in 2017. Since 2017, Gostin has also been the global health and legal editor of JAMA.
Gostin's notable students include Alexandra Phelan, who received her Doctor of Juridical Science degree under Gostin in 2020.

Views

In a January 2020 interview with NPR, Gostin argued against travel restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, stating, "the risk is extraordinarily low for people in the United States." In an April 2021 interview with Vox, he described his previous belief about travel restrictions being bad as an "almost religious belief" with no evidence behind it, saying "I have now realized... that our belief about travel restrictions was just that — a belief. It was evidence-free".

Awards and honors

  • 1994, the Chancellor of the State University of New York conferred an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree.
  • 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Vice Chancellor awarded Cardiff University's highest honor, an Honorary Fellow.
  • Elected lifetime Member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.
  • 2006, the IOM awarded Gostin the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal.
  • He has received the Rosemary Delbridge Memorial Award from the National Consumer Council for the person "who has most influenced Parliament and government to act for the welfare of society."
  • Received the Key to Tohoko University for distinguished contributions to human rights in mental health.
  • At the CDC Public Health Law Conference in 2006, he received the Public Health Law Association Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award "in recognition of a career devoted to using law to improve the public's health."
  • He is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

    Books

  • Foundations of Global Health & Human Rights
  • Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World
  • Principles of Mental Health Law and Policy
  • Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint
  • Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy and Practice
  • The AIDS Pandemic: Complacency, Injustice, and Unfulfilled Expectations
  • The Human Rights of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities: Different But Equal
  • Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader