Since 1984, the Maryland Carey Law program has been a center for scholarly and clinical excellence, training lawyers to meet the demands of the health law landscape.
Photo: Karen Rothenberg (left) and Diane Hoffmann.
In 2024, the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law celebrated the 40th anniversary of its top-ranked Law and Health Care Program. Since 1984, the program has been a center for scholarly and clinical excellence, training generations of lawyers to meet the demands of the ever-changing health law landscape.
The Law and Health Care Program was founded by then-professor (later Maryland Carey Law dean) Professor Emeritus Karen Rothenberg, JD, who foresaw the need for a comprehensive health law curriculum and an opportunity to meet that need by building expertise within the law school. The program was pioneering from the start, establishing the country’s first law school AIDS clinic in 1987.
Professor Diane Hoffmann, JD, joined the law school that same year and took over as program director in 1999. Hoffmann built on the foundation laid by Rothenberg and expanded student educational and faculty research opportunities by strengthening connections with the health professional schools on the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) campus, as well as by bringing in several major interdisciplinary research grants.
In the decades after Hoffmann was hired, the program developed to offer a broad-based curriculum with more than 25 courses, multiple clinical opportunities, 30-plus externship placements, a specialty journal, an annual health law regulatory competition, and a robust student health law organization. Over the last 27 years, more than 700 students have earned Health Law Certificates at Maryland Carey Law. The law school’s LLM and MSL programs also offer students the opportunity to specialize in health law.
In addition, the program provides students with opportunities to work with the law school’s Legal Resource Center for Public Health Policy, the Network for Public Health Law-Eastern Region, and the newly launched Cannabis Legal Resource Center, which provide health law expertise to federal, state, and local law and policy makers. The program also runs the Maryland Healthcare Ethics Committee Network, providing advice and consultation to hospital and long-term-care ethics committees in the state.
The program encourages and publishes scholarship on cutting-edge issues in health law. In conjunction with the Maryland Carey Law Journal of Health Care Law & Policy, the program holds an annual conference, with many of the speakers publishing articles in the journal.
Since 2019, the program has collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics to hold a biennial Charm City Colloquium at which bioethics and health law scholars share early-stage articles. Since 2020, the Rothenberg Health Care Law and Policy Speaker Series has engaged renowned scholars to give talks on contemporary health law issues. In summer 2023, the Law and Health Care Program hosted, along with the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, for the third time, the largest health law professors conference in the country.
Throughout the fall 2024 semester, the Law and Health Care Program held special events and programming to mark the milestone. One highlight was a celebratory dinner bringing together the program’s former and present leadership, faculty, and alums to connect and reflect on the past 40 years. The night featured insights from panelists who spoke about their experiences as health lawyers and perspectives on the future of health law.
They included David Cade, JD ’85, executive vice president/CEO of the American Health Law Association (AHLA); John Dailey, JD ’99, MPA, senior vice president for network development at Genie Health; Caroline Farrell, JD ’10, MPH, an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Division at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Karen Gally, JD ’96, vice president and general counsel at Otsuka Pharmaceuticals.
Preceding the event was this year’s annual Rome Lecture, a tradition that has also been around for four decades. Professor Erin C. Fuse Brown, JD, MPH, from Brown University School of Public Health’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research spoke on the financialization of the American health care system.
Enhancing the festivities this semester was the recognition of two of the program’s longtime faculty members, professors Richard Boldt, JD, and Kathleen Hoke, JD ’92.
Boldt received the designation of University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) Distinguished University Professor, the highest appointment bestowed on a faculty member at UMB. He joined Maryland Carey Law in 1989 and brings expertise in areas including mental disability law and drug treatment courts. Hoke, who joined the faculty in 2002, was named the 2024 UMB Founders Week Public Servant of the Year. She is director of the Legal Resource Center for Public Health Policy and the Network for Public Health Law’s Eastern Region. She teaches the Public Health Law Clinic and Seminar.
The milestone was a propitious time to welcome new faculty members to the program. This fall, associate professor Sarah Lorr, JD, whose scholarship focuses on disability and family law, joined the full-time faculty, along with professor of practice Bill Sarraille, JD, who teaches an innovative and practical course on pharmaceutical manufacturer fraud and abuse and will teach the Health Care Law and Policy course in the spring. Anya Marino, JD ’12, expanded expertise within the clinical faculty, signing on to launch Maryland Carey Law’s LGBTQI+ Equality Clinic, which addresses, among other important issues, access and gender justice in health care.
The new hires join faculty fixtures. In addition to Hoffmann, Boldt and Hoke, they include professor Michael Greenberger, JD, who came to the law school in 2001 as founding director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security; professor Leslie Meltzer Henry, JD, who joined the faculty in 2008 with expertise in ethical and legal issues at the intersection of medicine, public health, and public policy; and professor Amanda Pustilnik, JD, hired in 2009, whose work focuses on the intersections of law, science, and culture, with particular emphasis on the brain. Clinical instructor Sara Gold, JD, came to Maryland Carey Law in 2011 to lead the long-running Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic, which provides legal services to low-income clients living with HIV.
Faculty hires from the past five years include professor Natalie Ram, JD, a leading scholar in bioethics and the intersection of genetic privacy and the law; professor Matiangai Sirleaf, JD, who has published widely and extensively in areas including global public health law and health inequality and the law; and professor Liza Vertinsky, JD, an expert on the regulation of health care markets and emerging technologies, the role of public-private collaborations in innovation, and access to medicines.
The fall Rothenberg Speaker Series, focusing on discrimination in health care for the 2024/2025 academic year, celebrated the program’s anniversary with speakers Sara Rosenbaum, JD, from the Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University, discussing “From Legal Segregation to the ACA: How Law Can Make a Difference” and professor Khiara M. Bridges, JD, PhD, from UC Berkeley School of Law, speaking on “Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice.” In the spring, the series will continue with talks on sex and gender discrimination by Marino and disability discrimination with Samuel Bagenstos, JD, the Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, who currently serves as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Law and Health Care faculty also hosted a community Anchor Event to discuss recent health care-related Supreme Court cases with speakers including Henry, Marino, and Hoffmann, with special guest Kelly Roskam, JD, director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
The final event of the semester, “White Health and International Law” featured professors Sirleaf and Seye Abimbola, PhD, of the University of Sydney and took place Dec. 4 in person and virtually.
“Thanks to our renowned faculty, breadth of curriculum, clinical and experiential focus, and dedicated alumni partners and mentors, Law and Health Care Program graduates are extremely prepared for careers in the field of health care and life sciences law and continue to innovate and lead within the legal profession,” Hoffmann said. “We are proud to continue transforming and growing as we hit this milestone and look forward to continuing to lead in health law education.”
In honor of the 40th anniversary, the law school has established a fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $40,000 to support the Law and Health Care Program and has exceeded 50 percent of that goal.
To make a gift, visit the giving page.