Profile
Susan M. Wolf is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine, and Public Policy; Faegre & Benson Professor of Law and Professor of Law and Medicine at the University of Minnesota Law School; Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School; and a Faculty Member in the University's Center for Bioethics. She is also the founding Director of the University's Joint Degree Program in Law, Health & the Life Sciences and founding Chair of the University's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. She received her A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1975 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1980, with graduate work at Harvard University.
After clerking for a federal judge and practicing law for several years at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, in 1984 she became a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and then Associate for Law at The Hastings Center, a not-for-profit research institute now in Garrison, NY, specializing in biomedical ethics. She also taught law and medicine at New York University Law School for six years as an Adjunct Associate Professor. She was a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University in 1992-93, before joining the Minnesota faculty in the Fall of 1993.
Professor Wolf has served on a variety of governmental and institutional panels, including the American Bar Association (ABA) Coordinating Group on Bioethics and the Law, American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) Ethics Committee, New York City AIDS Review Panel, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Ethics Committee. She has acted as advisor on various topics to the U.S. Congress's Office of Technology Assessment, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association (AMA), and others. She has server on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics; American Journal of Bioethics ( AJOB ), Journal of Urban Health, and Journal of Women's Health and Law; a Fellow of The Hastings Center and past-member of the Fellows Council; a member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Board of Directors, she is former Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Law, Medicine and Health Care. She has lectured widely, in the United States and abroad.
Professor Wolf is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and book chapters that have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ), the American Journal of Public Health, the Hastings Center Report, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the American Journal of Law & Medicine, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, various law reviews, and other publications. She directed the Hastings Center project that produced the influential book, Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and the Care of the Dying (Indiana University Press, 1987), and is editor of Feminism & Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction (Oxford University Press, 1996). She writes frequently on death and dying, assisted suicide and euthanasia, genetics, assisted reproduction, women's health care, managed care, and other topics in health law, law and science, and bioethics.