Life Sciences Law & Policy Center

The Life Sciences Law & Policy Center at BCLT builds and expands upon the world-class research taking place in our IP & Competition Center. The Center offers a unique forum for students, academics, practitioners, and life sciences companies to explore IP, innovation, and regulatory issues.

In addition to creating a community for life sciences attorneys to discuss current issues, the Center will support research related to patent protection for drug innovations, bioethics, FDA regulations, AI and healthcare data, and health data privacy regulations.

The strength of this Center is its breadth of subject-matter expertise. The Faculty and Instructors that drive and contribute to this Center are among the world’s leading experts on the unique issues impacting the life sciences and health care areas. Notably, the Center also analyzes the impacts that life sciences innovations are having on society, including the important issues of criminal justice and social justice being researched in our Center for Technology, Justice & the Courts. The cross-pollination of this type of expertise provides a unique environment for education, research, and policy development.

We host and sponsor academic-focused events and industry-focused events–most of which are open to the public at no charge. Check out our upcoming events. As for past events, many of them are available on-demand–and free of charge–in our video library, B-CLE.

FACULTY

Osagie K. Obasogie is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Law at Berkeley Law with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health. Obasogie’s scholarly interests include Constitutional law, policing and police use of force, sociology of law, bioethics, race and inequality in law and medicine, and reproductive and genetic technologies. His writings have spanned both academic and public audiences. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press), was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize. His current work examines the role of science, medicine, and medical professionals in hindering the ability to hold police officers accountable when they use excessive force; analyzes the legacy of the American eugenics movement and its contemporary impact on law, science, medicine, and technology; studies how legal doctrine produces police violence; and exposes the limitations of DNA databases when they are used in criminal investigations. Publications, courses, and more »

Andrea Roth is a Professor of Law. She joined the Boalt faculty in 2011 after a tenure as a Thomas Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School. Before Stanford, she worked for over eight years as a trial and appellate attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS). At PDS she was a founding member of a Forensic Practice Group, which studied and litigated forensic DNA typing. She has lectured nationally on forensic science-related issues. She is also a member of the Constitution Project’s National Committee on DNA Collection and is an affiliate of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) for forensic science. Her research focuses on the use of forensic science in criminal trials, the continuing viability of the lay jury, and the ways in which concepts of criminal procedure and evidentiary law must be re-theorized in an era of science-based prosecutions.
Twitter: @andrealroth. Publications, courses, and more »

FELLOWS

Ramya Chandrasekhar
Ramya Chandrasekhar is a Biometric Regulatory research fellow at BCLT and leads the Biometrics Project. This project aims to study legal and institutional regulation of biometric data, from a critical and comparative perspective. Prior to joining BCLT, Ramya worked with the Legal and Innovation team at the World Bank as an International Finance and Development Fellow, on personal data protection enforcement involving digital platforms. She has also collaborated with the Information Communication and Technology team at UNICEF as well as Guarini Global Law & Tech, on projects relating to digital risk and data governance within international organizations. Ramya is a lawyer by training and is qualified to practice at the bar in India. She holds a Master of Law from New York University, and a Bachelor of Law from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. She also has over 4 years of experience working with law firms, civil society, and academic research centers on a range of issues at the intersection of law and technology, including digital ID and the digital welfare state, surveillance, information privacy, and Fintech regulation. Ramya’s research interests lie in global data law, critical data studies and science and technology studies.