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Health Law Program Faculty

Our health law faculty occupy the cutting edge of scholarship and legal practice surrounding health law. They are the authors of leading casebooks in the field, and they hold leadership posts in interdisciplinary organizations that represent academics and professionals in diverse fields. They are pushing the boundaries of health law.

Professor Barry R. Furrow

Barry R. Furrow

Barry Furrow is a pioneer in the field of health law. He is the lead author of “Health Law — Cases, Materials and Problems” (now in its 8th edition), which remains the leading casebook in the field. He is also co-author of the treatise, “Health Law,” which the U.S. Supreme Court has cited three times. His expertise spans a wide array of health-related topics, including health care policy, regulation and finance, patient safety, patient privacy, mental health, provider accountability, medical ethics and bioethics, and legal issues of pain management.


Professor Bret Asbury

Bret Asbury

Professor Asbury’s research explores social, and psychological impacts that diagnoses of fetal genetic abnormalities can have on pregnant women and their families and suggests legal and regulatory responses. His newest work explores ethical and legal implications of genetic counseling in the context of prenatal DNA modification.


Adam Benforado

Adam Benforado

Adam Benforado’s principal focus is on criminal justice and children’s rights. He is particularly interested in bringing insights from the mind sciences—most notably cognitive psychology—to law and legal theory. Collaborating with psychologists on novel experiments, Professor Benforado is committed to developing a more realistic understanding of the behavior of legal actors. He was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for his empirical work investigating human intuitions about punishment.


Professor David S. Cohen

David S. Cohen

David S. Cohen’s scholarship explores the intersection of constitutional law and gender, emphasizing how the law impacts abortion provision, including violence against abortion providers, as well as sex segregation and masculinity. He also researches voting anomalies in the Supreme Court.


Professor David DeMatteo

David DeMatteo

Professor David Dematteo is a leader in mental health law, a prolific scholar and the director of the the school's JD/PhD Program in Law and Psychology. His research interests include psychopathic personality, forensic mental health assessment, offender diversion and drug-involved criminal offenders and has been funded by the agencies and organizations that include the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Pennsylvania Department of Health, Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency and the American Psychology-Law Society.


Professor Robert I. Field

Robert I. Field

Professor Robert I. Field is an expert in public health law and the author of “Health Care Regulation in America: Complexity, Confrontation and Compromise,” published by Oxford University Press. He led the Health Policy Program at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, directed physician practice acquisitions for the University of Pennsylvania Health System and conducted research at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.


Paul Flanagan

Paul Flanagan

Paul Flanagan is an authority on compliance and privacy who brings decades of experience working with some of the nation’s leading health care providers and higher education institutions. Professor Flanagan’s publications include chapters in volumes such as the “2013 Health Law and Compliance Update” and articles in publications that include Health Systems Review and the ABA Health Law Section’s The Health Lawyer.


Aimée Kahan

Professor Kahan is Director of Strategic Initiatives.  She is an experienced legal practitioner and educator with a background in bioethics. A former appellate associate with Reed Smith, Professor Kahan supervised complex discovery proceedings in the U.S. and Europe that focused on compliance issues. She piloted a study on informed consent and helped develop a framework to process privacy data at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Among other courses, she teaches Bioethics and Reproductive Rights Law in the law school's J.D. program and Introduction to the Legal System in the MLS Program.


Professor Gwen Roseman Stern

Gwen Roseman Stern

Gwen Stern’s expertise includes medical malpractice and product-liability law as well as promoting trial advocacy skills and community awareness of legal procedures. She has been a faculty member providing intensive trial advocacy training on both a local and national level for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy.


Judy Goldstein Smith

J.D., Northwestern University School of Law
B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor Smith has been an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania specializing in complex health care, tax, securities, consumer and financial frauds, corruption, terrorism, narcotics and other federal crimes since 1980. She has previously served as an adjunct professor at Villanova University School of Law and Rutgers University School of Law-Camden teaching advanced criminal procedure and criminal litigation courses. She has received numerous Department of Justice awards including the Director's award and awards for her public service.