The Harvard Law School Library staff invites you to attend a book talk and panel discussion in celebration of Professor I. Glenn Cohen’s recently published book with co-editors Norman Daniels and Nir Eyal, Identified Versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.
Free download of the introduction from SSRN!
Wednesday March 11, 2015, 12:00 noon.
Harvard Law School, Room WCC 2012. (Directions).
Sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library.
Lunch will be served.
Four copies of the book will be given away during this book talk.
I. Glenn Cohen is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (or medical ethics), and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. 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 the U.S. Supreme Court. He was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2012-2013) and by the Greenwall Foundation to receive a Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics. He also leads the Ethics and Law initiative as part of the multi-million dollar NIH funded Harvard Catalyst for The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center program. Professor Cohen is the author of more than 60 articles and chapters, and his award-winning work has appeared in leading legal law review journals including: Stanford, Cornell, and Southern California; medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA; bioethics journals including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report; and for public health, the American Journal of Public Health. He is the editor of The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues (Oxford University Press, 2013).
“On August 5, 2010, a cave-in left thirty-three Chilean miners trapped underground. The Chilean government embarked on a massive rescue effort that is estimated to have cost between ten and twenty million dollars. There is a puzzle here. Many mine safety measures that would have been more cost effective had not been taken in Chile earlier, either by the mining companies, the Chilean government or by international donors. The Chilean story illustrates a persistent puzzle: the identified lives effect. Human beings show a greater inclination to assist persons and groups identified as those at high risk of great harm than to assist persons and groups who will suffer — or already suffer — similar harm but are not identified as yet. The problem touches almost every aspect of human life and politics: health, the environment, the law. What can social and cognitive sciences teach us about the origin and triggers of the effect? Philosophically and ethically, is the effect a “bias” to be eliminated or is it morally justified? What implications does the effect have for health care, law, the environment and other practice domains? This volume is the first book to tackle the effect from all necessary perspectives: psychology, public health, law, ethics, and public policy.” — Oxford University Press
Book talk panelists include:
Professor Norman Daniels is Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health.
Professor Nir Eyal is Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine (Bioethics) at the Harvard Medical School. He is also appointed at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health Department of Global Health and Population, and at the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health.