JHLI Year in Review

Letter from the Directors

The Jaharis Health Law Institute is always bustling with activity. We are excited to share some of the highlights of our past year—from our students, faculty, and alumni—and to look ahead to the coming one. This year, we welcome two new Jaharis Faculty Fellows, roll out a new partnership, host our annual Jaharis Symposium and the second-annual Compliance Institute with the support of a new gift, and much more.

Our students are busy taking courses toward their J.D. health law certificates, JD/LLM, and MJ degrees. They are completing externships with health systems, law firms, medical associations, pharmaceutical companies, and employee benefits firms. They are writing for and editing the DePaul Journal of Health Care Law and the brand new Jaharis blog. They are being mentored by terrific alumni and supporters of the Institute in Chicago and around the world. And they are landing their dream jobs doing regulatory and compliance, health transactional, health litigation, public interest, government, and policy work. The students are the heart of our Institute and the future leaders of our profession.

Our faculty both inspire the students and are inspired by them. In this past year, our faculty presented their scholarly work at dozens of conferences around the world and published in leading law journals, on blogs, and in op-eds. As public academics, our faculty were interviewed by the media on issues of national importance and interviewed others through the Jaharis Podcast. The Jaharis Faculty Fellows continue to be an invaluable addition to our faculty. This year, we said goodbye to Charlotte Tschider, who as a fellow wrote articles for the Washington University Law Review, Denver Law Review, and the Annals of Health Law, and also published in the Oxford Journal of Law & Biosciences, and the ABA’s The Law of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Machines (2019). And we welcomed two new fellows: Sharon Bassan and Valerie Gutmann Koch. Both are already renowned in their fields. Sharon comes to us having recently completed a postdoc at Princeton University, and with a book, Regulating Cross-Border Surrogacy, already forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Valerie Gutmann Koch is also already a well-known scholar in the field, having recently published work in both the University of Richmond and Houston Law Reviews. Valerie is serving as a Jaharis Fellow while also continuing her work as the Director of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

Finally, we must note our particular excitement at what is ahead for the Institute this coming year. We are rolling out an exciting new partnership with Dignity Health Global Education, which will allow us to educate students in health law from the country’s largest Catholic health system in addition to other health professionals. In the Spring, we will host our annual Jaharis Symposium, entitled Genetic Justice: Data, Privacy, and Crime, where we will welcome Sheila Jasanoff (Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School) as our featured speaker along with panels of top scholars from around the world. We are also set to welcome many fabulous speakers to DePaul in programming that is free and open to the public, including Maya Sabatello (Columbia University), Christopher Robertson (University of Arizona), Leslie Gerwin (Princeton University), Stephanie Kuhlmann (Lurie Children’s Hospital), Patrick Martinez (McDermott Will & Emery), and many others. And with the generosity of the new Gabriel and Cynthia Imperato Fund for Excellence in Health Law, we will be hosting the second annual CCB-approved Healthcare Compliance Institute.

As always, we are thankful for your support and we welcome your feedback and suggestions. Our doors are always open.

Sincerely,

Wendy and Kate

Wendy Netter Epstein
Faculty Director

Katherine V. Schostok
Executive Director​​​