Pitt to Hold Annual Mark A. Nordenberg Lecture in Law and Psychiatry Nov. 11

PITTSBURGH—Lawrence Gostin, internationally recognized scholar in law and public health, will present the University of Pittsburgh School of Law's Distinguished Nordenberg Lecture in Law and Psychiatry at noon Nov. 11 in the Barco Law Building's Teplitz Memorial Courtroom, 3900 Forbes Ave., Oakland.

Gostin's free public lecture is titled "The Rights of Persons with Mental Disabilities: A Global Perspective."

A professor of law at Georgetown University, professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, and the director of the Center for Law and the Public's Health, a collaborative center at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, Gostin also is the codirector of the Georgetown Johns Hopkins Program on Law and Public Health. In addition, he is a faculty affiliate for the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Steering and Executive Committees of the Institute for Health Care Research and Policy of Georgetown, as well as a research fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University.

Gostin is an elected lifetime member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM)'s National Academy of Sciences and serves on its Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, the Institutional Review Board, and several expert study committees. A past member of the IOM Committee on The Future of the Public's Health, Gostin serves as chair of the IOM Committee on Genomics in Population Health in the 21st century. He also is an elected lifetime fellow of the Hastings Center.

Appointed by the Secretary for Health and Human Services to serve on the Advisory Council of the Office of AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health, Gostin also consults for the World Health Organization (WHO), UNAIDS, and the Council of International Organizations for Medical Sciences.

Gostin is the Health Law and Ethics Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He also is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Journal on Regulation, Milbank Quarterly International Journal of Bioethics, and the International Journal of Health and Human Rights. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, executive editor of the American Journal of Law and Medicine, and Western European editor of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Gostin led the effort to draft the Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA) to combat bioterrorism and other emerging health threats. The MEHPA Act was drafted for the Center for Disease Control in collaboration with the National Governors Association, National Association of Attorneys General, National Conference of State Legislatures, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, and the National Association of City and County Health Officers. He is head of the team working on a Model Public Health law for the WHO and also working with the WHO on the revision of the International Health Regulations.

Gostin earned the Juris Doctor degree at Duke University and received the Honorary Doctorate of Law from the State University of New York. In 1974-75, Gostin was a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford University and the Social Research Unit, University of London.

The lecture, named after Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg, former dean of the law school, is approved by the Pennsylvania Continuing Legal Education Board for one hour of substantive CLE credit. For more information, e-mail joshi@law.pitt.edu or visit www.law.pitt.edu/alumni.cle/index.html.

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11/4/04/tmw