Susan Wolf

Susan M. Wolf is Regents Professor; McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine, and Public Policy; Faegre Drinker Professor of Law; Professor of Law; and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She earned an A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1975 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1980, with graduate work at Harvard University. Wolf's research specializations include bioethics, health law, medicine and law, science and law, disability, and women's legal issues. She chairs the university-wide Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences and serves as faculty chair of the Law School's Concentration in Health Law & Bioethics.

Wolf's career trajectory encompasses clerking for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, practicing law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and working as associate for law and project director at The Hastings Center. She joined the University of Minnesota Law School in 1993 as associate professor of law and medicine, earning tenure in 1996, and progressed through endowed chairs including Julius E. Davis Professor (1999-2000), Faegre Drinker Professor (2000-present), McKnight Presidential Professor (2006-present), and Regents Professor (2021-present). She founded and directed joint degree programs in Law, Health & the Life Sciences and Law, Science & Technology. Among her honors are election to the National Academy of Medicine (2009), fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008), member of the American Law Institute (2014), and fellow of The Hastings Center. She has received grants from NIH, NSF, Greenwall Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award (2012-2014).

Key publications include editor of Feminism & Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction (Oxford University Press, 1996); co-author of The Hastings Center Guidelines for Decisions on Life-Sustaining Treatment and Care Near the End of Life (Oxford University Press, revised 2d ed., 2013); principal author and project director of Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and the Care of the Dying (Indiana University Press, 1987); and editor of symposia in Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics on genomic medicine (2020), biopreservation (2024), and others. Wolf has served on national panels including the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (2011-2016), National Academies committees, ABA Coordinating Group on Bioethics and the Law, and ASRM Ethics Committee, and on editorial boards for Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics and American Journal of Bioethics. She has lectured widely in the United States and abroad.

Professional Email: swolf@umn.edu