Sandra H. Johnson - Childress Keynote Speaker
Emerita Professor of Law and Health Care Ethics
Saint Louis University

After a 30-year career at Saint Louis University School of Law, Sandra Johnson’s scholarship has helped form the field of health law. The casebook she co-authored in 1987, Health Law: Cases, Materials and Problems, was the first to use the title of “health law.” Now in its 6th edition, the book has been used in more than 150 universities in the United States and is still considered the leading health law textbook in the country. Johnson is also co-author of the treatise Health Law. The casebook and treatise have been cited over 500 times in scholarly articles and court opinions, including three citations by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Johnson’s continuing research interests include long-term care, pain management, medical licensure and bioethics. Much of her scholarship has focused on regulatory issues in pain management and has had a significant impact on research and public policy. In collaboration with other scholars at the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME), Professor Johnson and students at SLU drafted the Model Pain Relief Act that influenced legislation in several states. Professor Johnson also worked with the Federation of State Medical Boards in developing standards that are being used by most state medical boards. She directed the Mayday Project at ASLME for ten years and developed the Mayday Scholars Program, which provided funding to encourage legal scholars to turn their talent and time toward the issue of improving pain management. She edited five symposium issues of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, each of which produced original research concerning public policy and legal issues in pain management, with the most recent focused on pain management in emergency medicine.  

In 1982, Professor Johnson became the founding director of the Center for Health Law Studies, now recognized as one of the top health law centers in the country. She served as interim dean of the law school from 1991-92, after serving as associate dean from 1979-1981 and 1985-1988, and was provost of Saint Louis University from 1998-2002 before resuming teaching full-time. She was president of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics in 1995-1996 and became co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics in 2007, a position she continues to hold. She is also a Fellow of the Hastings Center and is a member of the Center’s task force developing new guidelines for the care of the dying.

Her numerous awards include the Thompson Coburn Faculty Scholarship Award, with co-author and colleague Professor Tim Greaney, 2004; Pellegrino Medal, HEAL Institute, Samford University, 2003; Woman of the Year Award, Women’s Justice Awards, St. Louis Daily Record, 2002; William J. Curran Distinguished Public Health Service Award, 2001; Woman of the Year, Saint Louis University, 1997; Outstanding Achievement Award, American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 1997; and the Distinguished Health Law Teacher Award, American Society of Law & Medicine, 1991.  

Scott Burris began his career in public health law during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He was the editor of the first systematic legal analysis of HIV in the United States, AIDS and the Law: A Guide for the Public (Yale University Press, 1987; New Guide for the Public waspublished in 1993), and spent several years lobbying and litigating on behalf of people with HIV as an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. Since joining the Temple faculty in 1991, his research has focused on how law influences public health and health behavior.

He is the author of more than 100 books, book chapters, articles and reports on issues including discrimination against people with HIV and other disabilities, HIV policy, research ethics, and the health effects of criminal law and drug policy. His current research topics include health governance, the regulation of sexual behavior, harm reduction and human research subject protection. He has been particularly interested in developing theory and methods aimed at promoting effective local health governance. His work has been supported by organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He has served as a consultant on public health law with organizations ranging from the United Nations Development Programme and the American Psychological Association to the Institute of Medicine and the producers of the Oscar-winning film Philadelphia. He is a member of the Law, Policy and Ethics Core of the Center for Interdiscplinary Research on AIDS at Yale, and serves as an advisor to the Tsinghua University AIDS Institute, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Research Center for HIV/AIDS Public Policy and the Program in Bioethics at Monash University.

Burris is a graduate of Washington University and the Yale Law School. He teaches courses in Torts, Civil Procedure, Public Health Law and International Public Health Law.

Robert A. Burt has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1976 and previously served on the law and medical school faculties at the University of Michigan and on the law faculty at the University of Chicago. Professor Burt has written extensively on biomedical ethics and constitutional law. His most recent book is Death is That Man Taking Names: Intersections of American Medicine, Law and Culture (University of California Press and the Milbank Memorial Fund, 2002). For preparation of this book, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997. He is also author of The Constitution in Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1992), Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land (University of California Press, 1988) and Taking Care of Strangers: The Rule of Law in Doctor-Patient Relations (Free Press, 1979). Professor Burt is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law (serving as chair from 1990-2000) and the Advisory Board of the Greenwall Foundation Bioethics Faculty Scholar Program. From 1993 to 2003, he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Project on Death in America of the Open Society Institute. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and has served on the IOM Committees on Care at the End of Life (1995-1997) and on Ethical and Public Policy Issues in Xenograft Transplantation (1994-1996). He received his J.D. degree from Yale University in 1964, an M.A. in Jurisprudence from Oxford University in 1962 and a B.A. from Princeton University in 1960.

Since 2004 Jesse Goldner has been a member of the University’s Conflicts of Interest Committee that reviews conflicts in the conduct of research. Between 1997 and 2004 Professor Goldner served as chairman of Saint Louis University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), which considers both biomedical and social science proposals for research involving human subjects. He had previously served on the IRB from 1978-1989. He was a founding member of the Council on Accreditation of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, serving between 2002 and 2006 and chairing the group in 2005. He also is a member of the Ethics Committee at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital.

Professor Goldner has written extensively in the areas of health law and bioethics. In 2005 he co-authored The Ethics and Regulation of Research with Human Subjects, published by LexisNexis Press. He previously served as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health Law, published by the American Health Lawyers Association, and has served as guest editor for issues of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. He received the 2004 Jay Healey Distinguished Health Law Teacher of the Year Award from the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

Professor Goldner received his A.B. and M.A. from Columbia University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has taught courses at the School of Law in Health Law, Comparative Health Law and Medical Malpractice, as well as in Evidence and Family Law. He also has offered seminars in Law and Psychiatry, Legal Controls of Experimentation with Human Subjects, Child Health and the Law, and Child Abuse and Neglect.

Mal Harkins is a partner at the Washington, D.C. office of the nationally known law firm of Proskauer Rose, LLP, where he practices health law in the areas of administrative law, criminal defense and corporate investigations. Before joining Proskauer Rose in 1992, Mr. Harkins practiced almost fifteen years with the prestigious health care firm of Casson & Harkins, of which he was one of the founders. He is a member of the Bar in the District of Columbia and the State Bars of California and Pennsylvania. Mr. Harkins currently serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Policy in the School of Public Health and Health Services and in the Department of Health Services Management and Leadership of The George Washington University.

In his practice, Mr. Harkins represents numerous institutional health care providers as well as state and national health care provider associations. He also represents individuals and companies involved in managed care, home health care, congregate living facilities, therapy services and durable medical equipment. Finally, Mr. Harkins represents several states on matters involving federal funding of state Medicaid Programs and other matters involving the relationship between state and federal government.

A frequent writer on health care issues, Mr. Harkins has published numerous articles on topics of interest to the health care industry. In addition, he often addresses state and national professional societies and associations, including, among others, the American Health Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association, the American Academy of Hospital Attorneys, the American Medical Directors Association, and the U.S. Department of Justice Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Regional Conferences.

As a recognized leader in the field of health law, Mr. Harkins has been selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America. He has also been named to Marquis Who's Who in American Law and Academic Keys' Who's Who in Health Sciences Education, and was identified by McKnight's Long Term Care News as on of the "100 Most Influential People in Long Term Care."

A 1976 graduate of the Saint Louis University School of Law (cum laude), Mr. Harkins served on the Saint Louis University Law Journal. He received his undergraduate education at St. Joseph's University where he studied history and theology.

William M. Sage
Vice Provost for Health Affairs and
James R. Dougherty Chair for Faculty Excellence,
University of Texas School of Law (Austin)

William M. Sage, MD, JD, an authority on health care law and policy, is Vice Provost for Health Affairs and James R. Dougherty Chair for Faculty Excellence at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining the faculty of UT-Austin’s School of Law in 2006, he was professor of law at Columbia University. He has also had appointments as a visiting professor at Harvard and Duke.

As Vice Provost for Health Affairs, Prof. Sage is charged with expanding UT-Austin’s contributions to biomedical research, the health professions, and health policy in partnership with other University of Texas campuses and the Austin community. Prof. Sage’s classroom offerings include Health Law, Regulation and Public Policy, Professions and Professionals, and Antitrust. His areas of research are patient safety, health care quality, access to health care, health insurance, medical liability, competition in health care, health care information, and the regulation of health professionals.

From 2002 to 2005, Professor Sage was principal investigator for the Project on Medical Liability in Pennsylvania, an intensive investigation of medical malpractice policy funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 1998, he received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study antitrust and regulatory oversight of quality in health care. Prof. Sage’s edited books include Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Uncertain Times: Kenneth Arrow and the Changing Economics of Health Care (Duke University Press, 2003). He has written more than 90 articles or book chapters for legal, health policy, and clinical publications, including JAMA, Health Affairs, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and the law reviews of Columbia, Duke, Texas, and Vanderbilt. He is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center on bioethics, and is a member of the editorial board of Health Affairs.

Prof. Sage received his A.B. from Harvard College and his medical and law degrees from Stanford University. He completed internship at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in San Diego, and served as a resident in anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Before entering teaching, Prof. Sage practiced corporate and securities law at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles and, in 1993, headed four working groups of the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform.