Ph.D., St. Louis University, 1978;
J.D., Yale Law School, 1981
Lawrence Nelson’s areas of specialization are bioethics, moral status theory, and practical and theoretical problems at the intersection of philosophy and law. He has a J.D. from Yale Law School, has practiced health law and litigation with a firm in San Francisco, and remains a licensed attorney in California. Prof. Nelson has published articles on ethics, law, and health care in journals such as the American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of the American Medical Association, Hastings Center Report, Lewis and Clark Law Review, Critical Care Medicine, Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, and Hastings Law Journal. He has served as a bioethics consultant to projects of the National Institutes of Health, the Hastings Center, and the American Thoracic Society, is a member of Ethics Committee at Stanford’s Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital, and is a Faculty Scholar in the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. He teaches courses such as Ethics in Health Care, Ethics and Constitutional Law, Ethics and the Law, Diversity and Disability, Ethics and Gender, Bioethics and the Law, Free Speech, Hate Speech, and Civil Discourse.