Awards

Titled Professor - 1999 - 2017

Samuel R. Rosen I Professor of Law

About David Orentlicher

Dr. Orentlicher is an expert in bioethics and law. He also specializes in constitutional law, criminal procedure and legal ethics. In addition to holding the Rosen professorship, Dr. Orentlicher is co-director of the Center for Law and Health at the Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis and an adjunct professor of medicine at the medical school.

Before coming to Indiana University in 1995, Dr. Orentlicher directed the American Medical Association's division of medical ethics. In that position, he drafted guidelines for the medical profession on a wide range of issues, including end-of-life decisions, health care access and rationing, organ transplantation, genetic testing, and physicians' conflicts of interests.

A former adjunct professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Northwestern University Medical School, Dr. Orentlicher has held the Visiting DeCamp Chair in Bioethics at Princeton University and the George E. Allen Chair in Law at the T. C. Williams School of Law, University of Richmond. He has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute, served on national task forces and advisory boards in bioethics and law, and testified before the U. S. Congress and several state legislative committees.

Dr. Orentlicher graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1981 after receiving his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Brandeis University in 1977. He completed an internship in internal medicine at the University of Michigan and then practiced medicine in Detroit before entering Harvard Law School. An editor of the Harvard Law Review, he graduated magna cum laude in 1986. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Alvin B. Rubin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Author of numerous articles in leading legal, medical and ethics journals, Dr. Orentlicher is co-author of the law school casebook, Health Care Law and Ethics. His most recent writings address physician-assisted suicide, maternal-fetal conflicts, human cloning, affirmative action and the ethics of representing criminal defendants.