Titles

Professor of Law

School Affiliation

Carey School of Law

Specialties

• Reproductive Justice
• Health Law

About

(410) 706-4480 lmeltzer@law.umaryland.edu

Leslie Meltzer Henry joined the Maryland Carey Law faculty in 2008 and has a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. She teaches constitutional law, biomedical research regulation and ethics, public health law and ethics, bioethics, and reproductive justice. She was co-chair of the law school’s Dean Search Committee and chair of the law school’s Judicial Clerkship Committee. She was voted Professor of the Year in 2017. Professor Henry is nationally recognized for her expertise in assessing, navigating, and advising on a range of ethical and legal issues that arise at the intersection of medicine, public health, and public policy. Her scholarly work primarily focuses on aspects of biomedical research regulation, and practice that have implications for, and are implicated by, social justice and public health. She has been an investigator on National Institutes of Health (NIH) and internationally funded grants, including most recently, a project examining the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the increasingly blurred boundaries between infectious disease and genetics, and a separate project involving the use of HIV phylogenetics in clinical care and public health. Professor Henry previously worked on projects aimed at developing ethically and legally acceptable strategies for including pregnant people in clinical research during public health emergencies. She is a core member of the Center for Bridging Infectious Disease, Genomics, and Society (BRIDGES) and the Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE). Professor Henry has served in an advisory capacity to a variety of federal, state, and local agencies and commissions—including the Department of Defense (DoD), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (OWH), the Trans-NIH Bioethics Advisory Committee, and the Maryland State Senate—to identify limits, as well as areas of flexibility, in regulations related to the inclusion of special populations in research. She has been quoted in media outlets including The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NPR, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, and the Baltimore Sun. Prior to joining the faculty at Maryland Carey Law, Professor Henry completed post-doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy, clerked for the Honorable Judith Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was a fellow in the NIH Office of Human Subjects Research, and was founder and editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.

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This information was last updated January 2, 2025.