AALS sections provide opportunities for law school faculty and staff to connect on issues of shared interest. Each section is focused on a different academic discipline, affinity group, or administrative area. For a full list of sections and information on how to join, please visit www.aals.org/sections.
As part of the ongoing “Spotlight on Sections” series, AALS sat down with the leadership of the Section on Biolaw.
The AALS Section on Biolaw promotes the communication of ideas, interests, and activities among members of the section and makes recommendations to the association on matters concerning Biolaw.
Why did you join the Section on Biolaw?
Chair – Jennifer D. Oliva, Indiana University Maurer School of Law:
Years ago, I was fortunate as a junior scholar to be invited to present at the Section on Biolaw. The Section had cross-posted to Law, Medicine & Health Care, and some other sections, and I was interested in this area of the law. This Section is a focus of my research interests, which is why I joined, and I have participated in this Section ever since.
Chair-Elect – Jordan Paradise, Loyola University Chicago School of Law :
About 10 years ago, I attended one of the Biolaw panels and realized that they were my kind of people. Scholars working at the intersection of law, science, and technology in a way that is not just health or administrative law. It’s focused on the intersection of many legal areas involved in life sciences, and I was hooked.
Why did you join the section’s leadership?
JP:
I felt compelled to step up and do the work to continue making the annual conference a great event. We need to plan programming, promote current scholarship, and reconnect at the conference. The Biolaw Section is such a tight group of scholars, and we tend to rotate numerous times through ’we all have to rotate through the leadership roles’. It’s important work to maintain momentum in this section, and I volunteered because of my love for this subject area.
JO:
It’s a very broad topic and very interdisciplinary, so it’s important to many people outside of law, obviously, but it’s the same reason I’ve met great people by doing it. We’ve cross-referenced with other sections on several occasions and co-sponsored programs, and you meet additional people who get the gist and become interested.
We conducted a cross-sectional thing last year with Law & Mental Disability, which is a section that I had previously chaired. So, I just started thinking about all the different connections there. It is an exciting time to be in leadership. It’s more exciting than I thought it would be when I agreed to do it over a year ago, but it’s certainly not boring right now, especially in the United States.
What is the leadership structure of your section?
JP:
I think we’re relatively simplistic as far as our organizational structure. I think AALS requires that you have at least a chair and a vice chair who work closely on planning for the annual conference and communicating with members. We’ve had various structures for our annual panels, including call for papers, plenary panels, and works-in-progress sessions for junior scholars. We are open to new ideas and new members to continue our work.
JO:
There’s a chair and a chair-elect. It’s very streamlined, so if anyone is interested in this section from reading this piece, I encourage people to join the section leadership. In this section, you’re immediately involved in the leadership structure, which may be appealing to individuals who enjoy organizing programming and reaching out to colleagues to set up panels. I appreciate the section’s streamlined structure.
What do your members research and teach?
JP:
The Section was founded on the idea that we all have a foot in multiple areas, and the unifying theme is that it is bio-focused, encompassing biopharmaceuticals, biological products, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices, which is the overarching product category of life sciences. Also, it includes intellectual property, administrative law, mental health, and environmental issues.
JO:
We have a number of members who teach law, technology, and scientific evidence. Also, the Section includes intellectual property experts due to the significant overlap between USPTO matters and FDA statutory exclusivity. Still other Section members specialize in privacy law, individual rights, finance reform, biopharmaceuticals, or rulemaking. This is an incredibly welcoming section in so many areas.
How does your section support scholarship from your members?
JP:
At Loyola University Chicago School of Law, we host the Wiet Life Science Law Scholars Workshop each year, which is geared towards junior scholars who present their work. I send out the call for papers for the workshop through the section’s listserv. There are a number of other national conferences and workshops that also focus on this particular topic. We as scholars do a good job of supporting scholarship in this arena, even outside the AALS annual conference.
JO:
At the same time that I joined this section, I had the opportunity to present at the Wiet Conference at Loyola, and I received excellent feedback. The workshop is set up so that there are more experts giving feedback than presenters. Those interested in Wiet must submit a draft paper early in the fall semester. Jordan circulates the drafts, and then you present and discuss your work with people who really care and who’ve carefully read your draft. The folks at Loyola, who organize and plan the Wiet workshop, are very careful about bringing in subject matter-expert colleagues who are constructive and extremely helpful to young scholars.
Several other law schools also sponsor health sciences conferences. I’ve been at UC Law SF, formerly Hastings, and Seton Hall. Both did these annual things, but only Wiet focuses on life sciences law papers. It’s such a terrific and enriching experience, so I hope we can feature it in the newsletter to ensure that junior life sciences law scholars consider getting involved with Wiet and the Section on Biolaw. That’s the first place I would recommend for a warm, supportive, scholarly-focused environment.
What are some important conversations happening right now in Biolaw?
JP:
For the first time, I felt like I was teaching a course where it was more about helping students process real-world events than it was about teaching them the law. There’s a lot of noise right now that is distracting from basic science, research, and funding, and it’s problematic and hard. I taught Food and Drug Law, Genetics Law and Policy last semester, and Administrative Law in the fall. I feel like this whole year was like, ‘What’s happening?’ and ‘How are we going to discuss it in the classroom?’ Even mundane things that students may never think about, such as federal agency leadership and executive orders, can have a significant impact on policy. Students have never paid attention to executive orders before. We’ve discussed those cases in administrative law, but I don’t think anyone has ever really considered how executive orders will impact their daily life as much as students have since January of this year. I think our students are, for the first time, witnessing the drastic impact that a change in administration can have on the law. It has been very dramatic, and I think a lot of it focuses on the space of science. It’s an attack on our fundamental scientific principles, federal agencies, and the scientists conducting that work.
We’re all dealing with it in our own ways, whether in our institutions as lawyers or as people with a foot in science; those are the conversations we’re having. What do we do next? What is our role? How can we help? How can we support? How can we change the narrative?
JO:
Very early in my legal academic career, someone said something like, “It’s always one step forward and two steps back in this space,” at a Biolaw event. I constantly think about that. There are numerous well-publicized issues and controversies in this space. My students are on social media and reading the news, and they constantly raise the point that Biolaw is in constant flux. Some of the public Biolaw controversies, such as the fight over vaccines, have already become embedded in official regulatory policy, and others are likely to become codified law; we are going to have to adapt to those changes.
From a personal perspective, I’ve been writing articles about the regulation (or lack thereof) of health care algorithms. My undergraduate degree is in computer science engineering, so that’s particularly interesting to me. However, I find myself constantly asked to respond to new controversies about long-standing drug law and policy issues, like anabolic steroids and cannabis, and push back against inaccurate claims. Vaccines are probably the classic example in the news today concerning reinvigorated fights about issues that were settled science. The barrage of misinformation and disinformation regarding these well-worn issues makes it more challenging to think and deal with the regulation of newer innovations.
How have recent policy changes shifted the focus of Biolaw scholars?
JP:
There are many important connections with people working in law, life sciences, and administrative law right now. Take the Food and Drug Administration as an example: There are a lot of uncertainties currently. We have a number of very important administrative law decisions that have completely upended our understanding of how federal administrative agencies operate, their authority, and the judicial oversight of their actions. It’s slightly terrifying because it puts agencies, especially those involved in scientific environmental regulation, in a state of uncertainty.
How do they proceed? What is going to be the next challenge? I think rulemaking will be the next challenge. And we now have a Supreme Court that’s more skeptical of what Congress intended agencies to do and how much power they hold.
Threading through all of that are basic governmental structures and who has access to information. Who can see all my information, and what authority gives that person, who was not chosen with the advice and consent of the Senate, but given a particular role in government? I think that’s frightening.
JO:
This is a turbulent time for administrative law and administrative law-reliant fields, such as FDA law. Not only is there a prevailing theory from the courts that the executive branch is all-powerful, but there is also an ongoing, aggressive attempt by the current administration to defund, dismantle, and reorganize several important health agencies. I think there are significant First Amendment issues across the board, including significant free speech and Establishment Clause issues regarding public health mandates, such as vaccination requirements.
The government’s collection of significant individual health information raises concerning privacy issues, including Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment concerns regarding the individual’s right to control their biological property and genetic information.
At the 2025 AALS annual meeting, the section hosted a program about reimagining laws affecting individuals with mental health conditions and substance use disorders. What sort of themes did this session address?
JO:
The Section’s chair last year, Stacey Tovino, put together that panel. Among other things, Professor Tovino presented her research regarding access to telehealth treatment for people with substance use disorders. The Biden FDA wanted to roll back some of the telehealth flexibilities introduced during the pandemic, but SAMHSA was in favor of extending them. As a result, there were federal agency conflicts, in addition to the issue that states have their own rules. Professor Tovino highlighted the challenges faced by the average individual attempting to keep up with the rapidly changing rules at both the federal and state levels, as well as the pressure placed on individuals seeking treatment in this area to achieve success.
Professor Elizabeth Pendo was also on that panel. She and I co-wrote a law review article concerning the implications of risk-scoring algorithms on people with disabilities. Professor Pendo analyzed the implications of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Section 1557, which is the anti-discrimination section of the Affordable Care Act, on the clinical use of those algorithms. As previously mentioned, I was part of the 2025 Biolaw panel and discussed clinical risk-scoring algorithms from the perspectives of privacy, HIPAA, and interstate data sharing. The final member of the panel was Professor Kelly Gillespie, who gave an interesting presentation about the ethics of refusing care to people who have substance use disorder but need a different kind of treatment, and how they’re discriminated against based on their risk and relapse profile.
What does the section have planned for the 2026 annual meeting?
JO:
We’re working together to create a timely panel featuring both legal academic and medical experts who will discuss the hot topic of vaccine hesitancy. Hopefully, we’ll have some intriguing and challenging conversations at the annual meeting about this important public health topic with the panelists, some of whom have lived experience regarding the constantly changing vaccine policies at the federal level.
JP:
We want to be as inclusive as possible of who joins us and whose voices are heard in these sessions. We could benefit not just from sitting in the same room with the same academics, but also from interacting with them. We all admire and respect each other, and we are familiar with each other’s work. However, we also want to hear the perspectives of those who are significantly impacted by some of these administrative challenges.
Resilience might be the focus, and we hope to gather some new voices with different perspectives on how they’ve been impacted and share their insights. I think it would be valuable to our section.
What is your vision for the section this year and the years to come? What new initiative, project-based or ongoing, would you like to see included in the section going forward?
JP:
Keeping the section going strong, which sounds boring, but it’s essential to maintain interest and keep people engaged. This involves providing programming that is informative and helpful to individuals, not just in their scholarship, but also in their teaching. Finding other ways outside of the yearly conference to keep the conversations going when we all meet in the same place. Our section members do a great job at that through workshops, engagement, nurturing, and mentoring young scholars. My primary goal, I would say, for the section and in my work, is to ensure that we are embracing people who genuinely care about these issues, bringing them in, fostering that community, and allowing them to thrive. From a long-term perspective, that’s my one goal.
JO:
I would love to see junior scholars and other members who haven’t held leadership positions but are passionate about this area of the law take on more initiatives in this section, get engaged with the leadership, and propose interesting and timely panels and other conference programming.
JP:
We’ve focused on a variety of programming areas. We’ve hosted a young scholar’s law program, which I think we should do again soon, because many more people are identifying and associating with the Biolaw focus, a life science focus. It’s a great opportunity to explore works in progress, with a specific focus on particular topics.
What are the best ways for interested faculty to get involved with this Section?
JO:
Well, they can sign up for the Section. They can certainly reach out to Jordan or me if they are interested in additional information about the Section. As previously noted, I highly recommend that junior Biolaw faculty consider submitting their work to the annual Wiet workshop and related conferences. Biolaw is an inclusive section because we want people to succeed in this space. The Section members understand not only the pertinent law and policy, but also the science that underlies some of these decisions. Especially now, more than ever, we need legal researchers who understand science.
JP:
I echo everything Jenn said and will also add the plug that the Wiet Life Science Law Scholars Workshop is on Friday, September 19th. It is a one-day workshop focused on junior scholars. We select four or five scholars. They do full draft submissions. We then ask them who their ideal expert readers are. We pull in two readers for each of those papers, and it’s like a full day of just talking about life science stuff. It has been helpful to junior scholars, and it’s one way we give back to the community.
JO:
Please come talk to us. You do not have to self-identify as a health law scholar to fit in with this Section. We openly welcome scholars who specialize in administrative law, privacy law, technology law, or any other area of law that is implicated by life sciences. There may be some misconceptions around what the Section is about, or theories that the Section’s focus is quite narrow and specific, but that’s not the case.
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
JP:
We’re still gathering momentum. We’re still informing people about our activities. Any illumination of our Section is helpful, especially since it’s an area where people might not have that identity yet. They might not know that they’re part of the Biolaw community, but they are, and if we can shed light on what we’re doing and how it intersects with such a broad array of legal and policy issues, I think they might say, ‘I belong here.’
JO:
Yes, the timing is on our side right now. Biolaw is front and center in the news and politics in the United States for the reasons we discussed in this interview, and, consequently, it is the perfect time to join our Section.