Prof. Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called “medical ethics”) and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and has advised the U.S. Vice President Harris on reproductive rights, discussed medical AI policy with members of the Korean Congress, and lectured to legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world. His work has been frequently covered by or appeared in media venues such as PBS, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe.

He was the youngest professor on the faculty at Harvard Law School (tenured or untenured) both when he joined the faculty in 2008 (at age 29) and when he was tenured as a full professor in 2013 (at age 34), though not the youngest in history.

Prof. Cohen’s current projects relate to medical AI, mobile health and other health information technologies, abortion, reproduction/reproductive technology, the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs, research ethics, organ transplantation, rationing in law and medicine, health policy, FDA law, translational medicine, medical tourism and many other topics.

He is the author of more than 200 articles and chapters and his award-winning work has appeared in leading legal (including the Stanford, Cornell, and Southern California Law Reviews), medical (including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA), bioethics (including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report), scientific (Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics) and public health (the American Journal of Public Health) journals, as well as Op-Eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Time Magazine, and other venues.

Cohen is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 20 books. They include: COVID-19 and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023); Reproductive Technologies and the Law (Caroline Academic Press, 2022);The Future of Medical Device Regulation (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Consumer Genetic Technologies: Ethical and Legal Considerations (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Readings in Comparative Health Law and Bioethics (Carolina Academic Press, 2020); Disability, Health, Law, and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Transparency in Health and Health Care in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Health Care Law and Ethics (Aspen, 2018); Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Law, Religion, and Health in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Specimen Science (MIT Press, 2017); Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics (John Hopkins University Press, 2016) The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Health Care Law (Oxford University Press, 2016); FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies (Columbia University Press, 2015); Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2014); Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (MIT Press, 2014); The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues (Oxford University Press, 2013).

For his law school teaching he was awarded the HLS Student Government Teaching and Advising Award in 2017. For the public he created the free online Harvard X class Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics, taken by more than 100,000 students. You can also watch his Tedx talk, Are There Non-Human Persons? Are There Non-Person Humans? He is also the faculty lead on Zero-L, an online course to help law students transition to law school that has been used by more than half of all U.S. law schools.

Prior to becoming a professor he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and as a lawyer for U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, where he handled litigation in the Courts of Appeals and (in conjunction with the Solicitor General’s Office) in the U.S. Supreme Court. In his spare time (where he can find any!) he still litigates, having authored an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court for in AMP v. Myriad, concerning whether human genes are patent eligible subject matter, a brief that was extensively discussed by the Justices at oral argument. Most recently he has helped with amicus briefs regarding mifepristone (for medical abortion) and gender-affirming care for trans minors. He also provides expert testimony in health law and bioethics litigation.

Cohen was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow for the 2012-2013 year and by the Greenwall Foundation to receive a Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics. He is also a Fellow at the Hastings Center, the leading bioethics think tank in the United States as well as being a fellow of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation. He leads the Project on Precision Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and the Law (PMAIL), which is part of the larger Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL). He is also the principal investigator for Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health and the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR). He previously served as the co-lead on the Regulatory Foundations, Ethics, and Law Program of Harvard Catalyst and as one of the key co-investigators on the multi-million dollar Football Players Health Study at Harvard, focused on improving the health of NFL players.

Cohen is also one of three editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press and serves on the editorial board for the American Journal of Bioethics. He served on the Steering Committee for Ethics for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canadian counterpart to the NIH, and the Ethics Committee for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Ethics Committee of the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). He has also served on the bioethics advisory groups for life sciences companies like Otsuka, Illumina, and Bayer.

You can freely download his work here, and follow him on twitter @CohenProf.

Education

J.D. Harvard Law School, 2003

B.A. Bioethics (Philosophy) and Psychology University of Toronto, 2000