News + Events

Speakers

Dr. Khiara M. Bridges

As Keynote Speaker, Dr. Bridges will deliver her speech, "Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, And Reproductive Justice."

Khiara M. Bridges is a nationally recognized expert on race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. She is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press.

She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College, receiving her degree in three years. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. While in law school, she was a teaching assistant for the former dean, David Leebron (Torts), as well as for the late E. Allan Farnsworth (Contracts). She was a member of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically trained ballet dancer. Currently, her fourth book, Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice, is under contract with MIT Press.

Ruqaiijah Yearby

Ruqaiijah Yearby, J.D., M.P.H is the inaugural Kara J. Trott Professor in Law at the Moritz College of Law. She earned her B.S. in Honors Biology from the University of Michigan, M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. She started her career as an Assistant Regional Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Professor Yearby has received over $5 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences. Her co-authored Health Affairs article with Professor Brietta Clark and Dr. Jose Figueroa, ‘Structural Racism in Historical and Modern U.S. Health Care Policy’, was one of the top two cited articles of 2022 in that journal.

Allison Whelan

Allison Whelan is an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law. Her research and teaching encompass a broad set of medical, science, and social policy issues at the intersection of administrative law, health and FDA law, constitutional law, bioethics, and reproductive justice.  Professor Whelan is the author of numerous law review articles and book chapters.

Prior to joining Georgia State Law, Professor Whelan was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and an Associate Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. She was also an associate at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington D.C. in the firm’s Food, Drug, and Device Practice Group. Professor Whelan clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable William J. Kayatta, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She also served as the inaugural senior fellow for the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

Professor Whelan graduated, summa cum laude and Order of the Coif, from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2014. She also holds a Master of Arts in Bioethics from the University of Minnesota.

Sharona Hoffman

Sharona Hoffman is the Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law, Professor of Bioethics, and Co-Director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Professor Hoffman received her B.A. from Wellesley College, her J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LL.M. in health law from the University of Houston, and an S.J.D. in health law from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She has written over seventy journal articles on health law and civil rights topics, Professor. Hoffman is also the author of two books: Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow, Second Edition (First Hill Books 2022) and Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data: Law and Policy (Cambridge University Press 2016). Dr. Hoffman has lectured throughout the United States and internationally and has been widely quoted in the press.  She is an elected member of the American Law Institute. For more information see her website http://sharonahoffman.com/.

Barbara Zabawa

Associate Professor Barbara J. Zabawa has devoted her legal career to health and wellness law. Before obtaining her law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School, she obtained a Master’s in Public Health degree from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. After participating in two different fellowships, including the coveted Skadden Fellowship, she sought to carve out a new practice area for lawyers interested in helping practitioners who want healthy lives to be the priority, rather than sickness care.

Before joining the UMKC faculty in Fall 2023, Barbara practiced Health Law in several law firms, including her own, the Center for Health and Wellness Law. She also clerked for the Honorable Barbara B. Crabb in the Federal District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Barbara has written extensively on health and wellness law topics, such as the Affordable Care Act, HIPAA, Medicaid, state licensure laws, and federal employment discrimination laws. Her book, Rule the Rules of Workplace Wellness Programs (published by the American Bar Association) is used in several Wellness Law courses across the country. 

Professor Zabawa teaches Health Law I, Health Law II and Healthcare Rights Law at UMKC. She is a Wisconsin native now living in the Kansas City area with her husband, twin teenagers, two dogs and two cats. She loves the idea of entrepreneurship and is happy to talk to anyone who has big dreams and ideas. 

Shavonnie Carthens

Professor Shavonnie Carthens is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky, J. David Rosenberg College of Law, where she teaches Healthcare Organizations and Finance, Public Health Law and Equity, and Civil Procedure. Her scholarly interests examine issues of environmental health law and health equity, with a focus on how the law can be a tool for improving access to healthy living environments for marginalized communities. Her commitment to environmental health justice is seen in her work as a partner of Louisville’s Environmental Health Literacy Coalition. The Coalition’s “Air Justice” project analyzes the impact of air pollution on the environment, to create resources that make the information around environmental justice and health equity more accessible for public audiences. Carthens is also a member of the Kentucky Resources Council’s Environmental Health and Justice Working Group and has contributed to discussions around environmental health law and health equity by being a regular speaker for universities and community organizations.

Dr. Abayomi Jones

Abayomi Jones currently attends Georgia State University College of Law. Her interests include health law and public health law, with a particular focus on policy and structural barriers of health equity and community development. Jones earned a B.S. from Spelman College and an M.D. from Harvard University College of Medicine. She spent many years in the service of underserved communities as a Family Medicine physician in Washington D.C., as well as California. 

Dr. John Parsi

John ParsiJD, Ph.D., is a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law. His work examines bodily autonomy at the intersection of health, science, and technology law. He has a particular interest in the ways we regulate and criminalize bodily autonomy and the impact on legal and civil rights. Parsi was President of the nonprofit Kids at Hope and Executive Director of the Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope at Arizona State University immediately prior to his VAP. He previously served as a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick and now Ninth Circuit Court Judge Morgan Christen, as well as Special Assistant to two Attorney Generals in Alaska. He received his JD from the University of Michigan Law School and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Arizona State University. 

Angela Dixon

After teaching for twelve years as an adjunct professor at three different schools, both online and in-person, Professor Angela Dixon joined the faculty of Mississippi College of Law in the Fall of 2021. Dixon's scholarly and research interests include criminal procedure (particularly the criminal justice system), health law, ethics, law & religion, and teaches Criminal Procedure, Health Law, and Ethics, and Professional Responsibility. Professor Dixon earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Vanderbilt University, cum laude with honors including the Dean's List and a Book award. Dixon has gone on to earn a Master of Public Health (MPH) and a Master of Divinity (MDiv), with a certificate in Faithe and Health, both from Emory University. 

Moderators

Dr. Laura Hoffman

CSU|LAW Professor and Co-Director, CSU|LAW Center for Health Law and Policy

Dr. Abigail Moncrieff

CSU|LAW Professor adn Co-Director, CSU|LAW Center for Health Law and Policy

Registration

$75 for CLE Credit - REGISTER HERE

Free for Non-CLE attendees and CSU Faculty, Staff & Students - REGISTER HERE

Sponsorship opportunities are also available at the link below!  

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