John D. Valentine Professor of Law

Protecting the rights and welfare of research participants has been Jesse Goldner’s mission for more than 25 years. An author and frequent speaker in academia and the media who, for many years, chaired the Saint Louis University Institutional Review Board (IRB), Goldner is a member and past chair of the Council of Accreditation of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research (AAHRPP), a national body created by seven non-profit founding member organizations representing the leadership of universities, medical schools and teaching hospitals; biomedical, behavioral and social scientists; IRB professionals; and patient and disease advocacy organizations.

“As an academic, you sometimes wonder whether anyone reads what you write or whether you’ve had an influence on anything,” says Professor Goldner. “But my work with regulating research on human subjects has a clear, useful impact. I can look at what I’m doing and know I’m helping to keep really poor, possibly dangerous, research from happening or improving the quality of good research so as to better protect research participants.”

Professor Goldner is uniquely qualified for the job. Torn between psychology and law, he decided to pursue degrees in both — his master’s degree in psychology is from Columbia University and his law degree is from Harvard. Before entering his third year of law school, Professor Goldner spent a summer at Beldock, Levine & Hoffman, a high-powered New York law firm where, among other matters, he helped write a brief in the appeal of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s homicide conviction. That law firm experience convinced him to seek a career in teaching, where he could maximize his ability to spend time in areas that most interested him.

When Professor Goldner graduated from law school in 1973, he was one of few with interdisciplinary training. He joined the faculty at Saint Louis University that year and initially directed much of his time to developing the School's Civil and Criminal clinical programs.

Thereafter he was a co-founder of the Center for Health Law Studies. Professor Goldner directed the center, off and on, over a 15-year period and until recently, served as one of three faculty co-editors of the Journal of Health Law, published by the American Health Lawyers Association. For three years he served as associate dean for faculty affairs of the law school. For over 25 years he has been a member of the Ethics Committee of Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital.

Professor Goldner’s research initially focused on family law, law and psychiatry, and various other law and medicine topics. Most recently he has worked primarily with issues related to the law and ethics of research on human subjects. His book, Ethics and Regulation of Research with Human Subjects, co-authored with three other lawyer-bioethicists, was published by Lexis/Nexis in the summer of 2005.

Professor Goldner has been a visiting professor at a number of American and foreign law schools and has been actively involved in conducting law school accreditation site visits for the American Bar Association. In 2005 he was appointed to the Accreditation Committee of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. He holds secondary appointments as professor of law in psychiatry and professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, professor of health administration at the School of Public Health and professor of Health Care Ethics at the University’s Graduate School Center for Health Care Ethics.