Leslie Meltzer Henry

Professor of Law

Phone: (410) 706-4480 Fax: (410) 706-2184 Email: lmeltzer@law.umaryland.edu Office: 434

BA, University of Virginia
MSc, Oxford University
JD, Yale Law School
PhD, University of Virginia

Courses: Advanced Bioethics and the Law Seminar/course; Constitutional Law II: Individual Rights; Public Health and the Law; Reproductive Justice and the Law Seminar

Biography Publications

Biography

Leslie Meltzer Henry joined the law school faculty in 2008 and has a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. She teaches constitutional law, biomedical research regulation and ethics, public health law and ethics, bioethics, and reproductive justice. She is co-chair of the law school’s Dean Search Committee and chair of the law school’s Judicial Clerkship Committee. She was voted Professor of the Year in 2017.

Professor Henry is nationally recognized for her expertise in assessing, navigating, and advising on a range of ethical and legal issues that arise at the intersection of medicine, public health, and public policy. Her scholarly work primarily focuses on aspects of biomedical research regulation and practice that have implications for, and are implicated by, social justice and public health. She has been an investigator on National Institutes of Health (NIH) and internationally funded grants, including most recently, a project examining the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the increasingly blurred boundaries between infectious disease and genetics, and a separate project involving the use of HIV phylogenetics in clinical care and public health. Professor Henry previously worked on projects aimed at developing ethically and legally acceptable strategies for including pregnant people in clinical research during public health emergencies. She is a core member of the Center for Bridging Infectious Disease, Genomics, and Society (BRIDGES) and the Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE).

Professor Henry is an associate editor of the Oxford Handbook for Public Health Ethics (OUP, 2016), and a contributor to both the Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics (OUP, 2020) and the Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics (OUP, 2008). Her scholarship has been published in the nation’s leading peer-review medical journals (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine; JAMA; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; AIDS; Obstetrics & Gynecology; BMC Reproductive Health; Ethics & Human Research; Hastings Center Report) and law reviews (e.g., University of Pennsylvania Law Review; Michigan Law Review; Georgetown Law Journal; Journal of Law and the Biosciences; Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics; Journal of Health Care Law & Policy).

Professor Henry has served in an advisory capacity to a variety of federal, state, and local agencies and commissions—including the Department of Defense (DoD), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (OWH), the Trans-NIH Bioethics Advisory Committee, and the Maryland State Senate—to identify limits, as well as areas of flexibility, in regulations related to the inclusion of special populations in research. She has been quoted in media outlets including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NPR, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, and the Baltimore Sun.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, Professor Henry completed post-doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy, clerked for the Honorable Judith Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was a fellow in the NIH Office of Human Subjects Research, and was founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.

Publications

Book Chapters

Closing the Gap: Improving Women's Health through Research Inclusion, in The Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics (Ana S. Illtis & Douglas MacKay eds., 2020) (with Anna C. Mastroianni).

Linking Patient Registries and Biorepositories, in Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide (2018) (with others).

What is Fair Subject Selection?, in The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics 377 (Ezekiel Emanuel et al. eds., 2008) (with James Childress).

Articles

Scientific, Ethical, and Legal Considerations for the Inclusion of Pregnant People in Clinical Trials, 227 American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology 805 (2022) (with others). [Full Text]

For Now, It's Unethical to Use Human Challenge Studies for SARS-CoV2 Vaccine Development, 117 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 28,538 (2020) (with others). [Full Text]

Legal Obstacles to Including Adolescents in HIV Prevention Research, Journal of Medical Ethics (forthcoming) (with H. Cleckler).

Ethical Considerations Concerning Amnioinfusions for Treating Fetal Bilateral Renal Agenesis, 131 Obstetrics & Gynecology 130 (2018) (with others).

Legal Complexities of Global Vaccine Compensation Systems, 317 JAMA 1911 (2017) (with Anna C. Mastroianni).

Ethics, Regulation, and Beyond: The Landscape of Research with Pregnant Women, 14 (Supp. 3) BMC Reproductive Health 173 (2017) (with others).

Research with Pregnant Women: New Insights on Legal Decision-Making, 47(3) Hastings Center Report 38 (2017) (with others).

Advancing HIV Research with Pregnant Women: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities, 30 AIDS 2261 (2016) (with others).

Respect and Dignity: A Conceptual Model for Patients in the Intensive Care Unit, 5.1A Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics 5A (2015) (with others). [Full Text]

Just Compensation: A No-Fault Proposal for Research-Related Injuries, Journal of Law & the Biosciences (2015). [Full Text]

Moral Gridlock: Conceptual Barriers to No-Fault Compensation for Injured Research Subjects, 41 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 411 (2013). [Full Text]

Revising the Common Rule: Prospects and Challenges, 41 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 386 (2013). [Abstract]

Commerce Games and the Individual Mandate, 100 Georgetown Law Journal 1117 (2012) (with Max Stearns). [Full Text]

Adolescent Medical Decision Making and the Law of the Horse, 15 Journal of Health Care Law & Policy 1 (2012) (with Amanda Pustilnik). [Full Text]

The Jurisprudence of Dignity, 160 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 169 (2011). [Full Text]

Book Review, Visionary Pragmatism and the Value of Privacy in the Twenty-First Century, 108 Michigan Law Review 1107 (2010) (reviewing Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (2008)) (with Danielle Keats Citron). [Full Text]

Deciphering Dignity, American Journal of Bioethics, July 2010, at 59. [Full Text]

Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics, 359 New England Journal of Medicine 660 (2008). [Full Text]

Undesirable Implications of Disclosing Individual Genetic Results to Research Participants, American Journal of Bioethics, Nov.-Dec., 2006, at 28. [Full Text]

Leslie Meltzer Henry

Professor of Law

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