Two Yale Health Law Scholars Appointed to Tenure-Track Professorships
Two senior health scholars at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School have been appointed to tenure-track professorships.
Yaron Covo, the Center’s 2023-2025 Senior Academic Fellow, will join the faculty at Case Western Reserve University School of Law as an Assistant Professor. During his time at the Center, Covo played a prominent role in the development of the recently published book “Law and the 100-Year Life,” edited by Solomon Center Faculty Director and Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law Abbe R. Gluck ’00, Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation Anne L. Alstott ’87, and Solomon Center Associate Research Scholar Eugene Rusyn ’17, including co-authoring a chapter with Gluck and Dr. Linda Fried, Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
While at the Solmon Center, Covo also authored “The Contractualization of Disability Rights Law,” which is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review and was selected for the prestigious Ninth Annual Health Law Works-in-Progress Retreat at Seton Hall Law School. In addition, he helped form a medical-legal research team, led by Yale School of Medicine’s Dr. Mihir Gupta, which is pursuing two major projects: one at the intersection of Alzheimer’s treatment and legal theory, and the other on the health implications of sports betting. Covo and team member Melisa Olgun ’24 presented the team’s first paper, “The Legal Side Effects of Alzheimer’s Medication,” at the Eighth Conference for Junior Researchers at Stanford Law School.
“The Solomon Center has taught me the importance of applying an interdisciplinary lens to research on health law and policy. When lawyers, physicians, and public health experts collaborate, the quality of the research increases significantly,” Covo said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better place to launch my career as a law professor, and I’m excited to begin a new chapter at CWRU Law.”
After three years teaching Healthcare Business Ethics in Yale’s Department of Political Science, Solomon Center student alumna and graduate affiliate Ximena Benavides ’06 LLM, ’22 J.S.D., will join the University of Georgia Terry College of Business as an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies. At UGA, Benavides will teach business law and ethics, as well as health law and innovation elective courses. Among her many accomplishments at Yale since graduation, Benavides is Affiliated Faculty at the Yale Institute for Global Health, where she worked for the GAVI vaccine alliance on the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access initiative (also known as COVAX), which focused on the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines; a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project; and an affiliate researcher to the Yale Collaboration for Regulatory Rigor, Integrity, and Transparency (CRRIT), Yale’s premier interdisciplinary initiative conducting strategic research to ensure access to quality and safe medicine, co-directed by Yale School of Medicine Professors Reshma Ramachandran and Joseph Ross.
Benavides’s research on equitable access to health care uses a political economy approach to public and private law, to analyze the financialization of health care, industrial policy, the knowledge economy, and sustainable medical innovation. Her scholarship has been published in The University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law & Social Change, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, as well as peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
“I am thrilled to join UGA and continue my interdisciplinary research on industrial policies in health technology at the intersection of law, ethics, and political economy,” Benavides said.
