Larry Gostin
Lawrence Oglethorpe Gostin (born October 19, 1949) is an American law professor who specializes in public health law. He was a Fulbright Fellow and is best known as the author of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and as a significant contributor to journals on medicine and law. Early life and education. Larry Gostin was born in New York City in 1949, the son of Joseph and Sylvia Gostin. He received a B.A. in psychology from the State University of New York at Brockport in 1971 and a J.D. from Duke Law School in 1974. He was  an adjunct professor at Harvard University from 1986 to 1994 and went on to be a professor of law at Georgetown University's Law Center and a professor of law and public health at Johns Hopkins University's School of Hygiene and Public Health. Career in health law. From January 1984 to 1985, Gostin was general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties in the United Kingdom. From 1986 to 1994, he was executive director of the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Bioethics. He worked on Hillary Clinton's health plan, serving as chairman of the health information  privacy and public health committees of the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform. His proposed Model State Emergency Health Powers Act ignited a firestorm of controversy across the ideological spectrum, from Phyllis Schlafly to LAMBDA, for being overly broad and ripe for abuse. He is also Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Center for Law & the Public's Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities—A Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is Adjunct Professor of Public Health (Faculty of Medical  Sciences) and Research Fellow (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) at Oxford University. Gostin chairs a World Health Organization project on the law and ethics of public health strategies for pandemic influenza and is leading a drafting team on developing a Model Public Health Law for the World Health Organization. In a January 25, 2020 interview with NPR, Gostin argued against travel restrictions to prevent the spread of coronavirus, stating, “The risk is extraordinarily low for people in the United States.” In an April 2021 interview with Vox, he described his previous belief about travel restrictions being bad as an "almost  religious belief" with no evidence behind it, saying “I have now realized [..] that our belief about travel restrictions was just that — a belief. It was evidence-free”. He is the Linda D. and Timothy J. O'Neill Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.