Stephen Latham

Ph.D. 1996, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California at Berkeley

J.D. 1985, Harvard Law School

A.B. 1982, Social Studies, Harvard College

Stephen R. Latham became Director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics in 2011, having been Deputy Director since 2008.  For the previous nine years, he had been Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Health Law & Policy at Quinnipiac University School of Law; during that time, he also taught business ethics at the Yale School of Management each year. Before entering academia full-time, Latham served as Director of Ethics Standards at the American Medical Association, and as secretary to its Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. His research deals broadly with the intersections of bioethics with law. At Yale, he teaches a mix of undergraduate, graduate, MBA and medical courses on law-and-bioethics, comparative bioethics, business ethics and law, and responsible conduct of research. In the past, he has taught health law and ethics-related courses at the law schools of Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Harvard, and to college students at Brown.

Latham is a former graduate fellow of Harvard’s Safra Center on Ethics; a former Research Fellow of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities; and a former vice-chair of the ABA Health Law Section’s Interest Group on Medical Research, Biotechnology and Clinical Ethics. He has served on the Yale Medical School’s IRB, on Connecticut’s Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, and on the board of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, from whom he received a Distinguished Service Award. Latham currently does clinical ethics consultation with the Pediatric Ethics Committee of Yale-New Haven’s Children’s Hospital, and serves on the Medical Review Board of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.

Latham’s publications on health law, professionalism and bioethics have appeared in numerous journals and law reviews, including JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report ,the Journal of Legal Medicine, the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. He has contributed chapters to numerous university-press books, including the Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics and the Cambridge World History of Bioethics. He has been book-review editor for the American Journal of Bioethics, serves on the editorial boards of the Cambridge Dictionary of Bioethics and the American Journal of Law and Medicine, and is an associate editor for the upcoming fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (Macmillan Reference, 2012). His co-edited book, The American Medical Ethics Revolution (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press) was selected by Choice as one of the “top academic books of 2000.”