ThaddeusPope.com

Biography

Professor Thaddeus Pope is Director of the Health Law Institute and an Associate Professor of Law at Hamline University. He is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at Albany Medical College, where he teaches both M.S. courses and CME for the Alden March Bioethics Institute.  During 2013-2014, Professor Pope will be a Network Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. 

In his scholarship, Professor Pope has focused on two main areas: (1) end-of-life medicine and (2) public health ethics. Whether addressing medical futility disputes or smoking bans Professor Pope is especially concerned with exploring the justifiability of limitations on individual liberty. His work has appeared in: law reviews, bar journals, medical journals, nursing journals, bioethics journals, and book chapters. He authors a regular column for the Journal of Clinical Ethics. And he writes about legislative, judicial, regulatory, medical, and other developments concerning end-of-life medical treatment conflicts for the Medical Futility Blog and Bioethics.net.

Professor Pope’s engagement with these issues goes beyond scholarship. For example, he has participated both as appellate counsel and as expert witness in cutting-edge litigation. He has been invited to testify before both the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Texas House of Representatives.  He is a member of MEDCAC, the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee.  He has served as legal consultant to several Policy Statement groups of the American Thoracic Society. And Professor Pope helped draft MOLST regulations for the state of Delaware.

Before joining Hamline in 2012, Professor Pope taught at the Widener University School of Law from 2007 to 2011, and at the University of Memphis from 2005 to 2007.  Before joining academia, Professor Pope clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and practiced for seven years as a corporate litigator with Arnold & Porter LLP in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Professor Pope was graduated from Georgetown University, where he received both his J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy and bioethics. He earned his B.A. (in philosophy) from the University of Pittsburgh with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Expertise

              Health Law             Bioethics                          Patient Rights                            Clinical Ethics

              Torts                       Medical Liability               End-of-Life Decisions               Informed Consent 

Research Focus 

•      Medical Futility and other legal obstacles to good end-of-life care
•      Internal Dispute Resolution mechanisms, particularly ethics committees
•      Tort Law, particularly consent and the assumption of risk doctrine
•      Public Health Law, particularly voluntary self-regarding conduct
•      Normative Jurisprudence, particularly the justifiability of hard paternalism

Teaching