About the Authors
Janet Dolgin
Janet Dolgin is the Jack and Freda Dicker Distinguished Professor of Health Care Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Health Law & Policy at Hofstra University.
Professor Dolgin has a B.A. in philosophy from Barnard College, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Princeton University, and a J.D. from the Yale Law School. Her scholarly work combines insights from anthropology and legal scholarship.
Professor Dolgin is co-director of the Hofstra Institute for Health Law and Policy. Before coming to Hofstra she taught anthropology at Columbia University and served as an associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Manhattan. In 1988-89 she taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a Fulbright Scholar. She has also held appointments as a visiting professor of law at Cornell Law School, Boston University School of Law, and Cardozo School of Law.
Professor Dolgin's books include Jewish Identity and the JDL (Princeton University Press), Symbolic Anthropology (co-edited, Columbia University Press), Defining the Family (NYU Press), and Bioethics and the Law (co-authored with Lois Shepherd, Aspen Publishers).
Professor Dolgin has written many articles, published in a variety of law reviews, other scholarly journals, and edited volumes. Much of this work has analyzed legal responses to shifts in the family (including those occasioned by developments in reproductive technology and by the "new genetics") and to shifts in the structure of health care in the United States and elsewhere. Her most recent work focuses on disparities in health and in health care. Professor Dolgin lectures widely in the United States and abroad about health care law, bioethics, and family law.
Lois Shepherd
Lois Shepherd is Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Professor Shepherd is an expert in the fields of health law and bioethics. Her primary appointment is in the medical school’s Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities where she directs the center’s programs in medicine and law. She teaches courses in health care law and ethics at both the law school and the medical school.
After receiving her law degree from Yale University, where she served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, Shepherd practiced corporate law for six years with the Charlotte, N.C., firm of Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson, P.A. She began her academic career in 1993 at the Florida State University College of Law. Prior to joining the UVA faculty, Shepherd was the Florida Bar Health Law Section Professor and D’Alemberte Professor of Law at Florida State.
Within the field of bioethics and law, Shepherd’s current scholarly and teaching interests are focused on legal and ethical issues at the end of life and in human subject research.
