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Nadia N. Sawicki

Title/s:  Georgia Reithal Professor of Law
Co-Director of the Beazley Institute for Health Law & Policy

Office #:  Corboy 725

Phone: 312.915.8555

Email:

CV Link: Sawicki CV

About

Prof. Sawicki’s areas of expertise include torts, health law, and bioethics. Her scholarly work addresses subjects including the law's role in shaping the informed consent process; tort law's limitations in protecting the rights of patients in the end-of-life and reproductive health contexts; the challenges of protecting patients' rights to safe and accessible medical care while also accommodating health care providers' conscientious beliefs; and the state’s role in enforcing ethical norms in medicine.

In 2020, Prof. Sawicki was elected as a member of the American Law Institute. She has previously served as a member of the American Bar Association’s Special Committee on Bioethics and the Law, and co-chair of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ Law Affinity Group.

Prior to joining Loyola, Prof. Sawicki held the inaugural George Sharswood Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught bioethics and public health law. She has also served as a lecturer in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences, practiced law with Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, and clerked for the Honorable J. Curtis Joyner of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Before attending law school, Prof. Sawicki worked as an analyst in the Nursing Executive Center at the Advisory Board Company.

Degrees

BA magna cum laude, Brown University
M. Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
JD cum laude, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Program Areas

Torts
Health Law: Patients and Populations
Bioethics Law and Policy
Health Justice Lab: End of Life

Selected Publications

Professor Nadia Sawicki's SSRN Webpage

Tort Law Implications of Compelled Physician Speech, Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2021)

Unilateral Burdens and Third Party Harms: Abortion Conscience Laws as Policy Outliers, Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2021)

Rewritten Opinion: Burton v. State, in Seema Mohapatra and Lindsay F. Wiley, eds., Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Health Law Opinions (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021)

The Conscience Defense to Malpractice, California Law Review (forthcoming 2020)

Defining the Known Risk: Context-Sensitivity in Tort Law Defenses, Journal of Tort Law (2019)

Everything in Moderation: Dual Role Consent and State Law Mandates, American Journal of Bioethics (2019) (with Valerie Gutmann Koch)

Disentangling Conscience Protections, Hastings Center Report (2018)

Conscience as a Civil and Criminal Defense, American Journal of Bioethics (2018)

Choosing Medical Malpractice, Washington Law Review (2018)

A Common Law Duty to Disclose Conscience-Based Limitations on Medical Practice, in Holly Fernandez Lynch, I. Glenn Cohen, and Elizabeth Sepper, eds., Law, Religion and Health in the United States (Cambridge 2018)

Complaints to Professional and Regulatory Bodiesin Bill Sage, Glenn Cohen, and Allison Hoffman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of American Health Law (Oxford 2017)

Pharmacies’ Duty to Dispense Emergency Contraception and Religious Liberty, Obstetrics and Gynecology (2017) (with Y. Tony Yang)

Informed Consent as Societal Stewardship, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (2017)

Religious Hospitals and Patient Choice, Hastings Center Report (2016)

Who Judges Harm?, Journal of Clinical Ethics (2016)

Modernizing Informed Consent: Expanding the Boundaries of Materiality, University of Illinois Law Review (2016)

Mandating Disclosure of Conscience-Based Limitations on Medical Practice, American Journal of Law & Medicine (2016)

Informed Consent as Compelled Professional Speech: Fictions, Facts, and Open Questions, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy (2016)

Ethical Limitations on the State’s Use of Arational Persuasion, Law & Policy (2016)

Clinicians’ Involvement in Capital Punishment – Constitutional Implications, New England Journal of Medicine (2014)

Compelling Images: The Constitutionality of Emotionally Persuasive Health Campaigns, Maryland Law Review (2014)

A New Life for Wrongful Living, New York Law School Law Review (2014)

Patient Protection and Decision Aid Quality: Regulatory and Tort Law Approaches, Arizona Law Review (2012)

The Hollow Promise of Freedom of Conscience, Cardozo Law Review (2012)

Informed Consent Beyond the Physician-Patient Encounter: Tort Law Implications of Extra-Clinical Decision Support Tools, Annals of Health Law  (2012)

The Abortion Informed Consent Debate: More Light, Less Heat, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy (2011)

Judging Doctors: The Person and the Professional, AMA Journal of Ethics (2011)

Character, Competence, and the Principles of Medical Discipline, Journal of Health Care Law and Policy (2010)

There Must Be A Means: The Backwards Jurisprudence of Baze v. Rees, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (2010)

Doctors, Discipline, and the Death Penalty: Professional Implications of Safe Harbor Policies, Yale Law and Policy Review (2008)

Without Consent: Moral Imperatives, Special Abilities, and the Duty to Treat, American Journal of Bioethics (2008)

Compliance with Advance Directives: Wrongful Living and Tort Law Incentives, Journal of Legal Medicine (2008) (with Holly Fernandez Lynch and Michele Mathes)