Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scholar Dr. Joseph Fins is Honored by Spanish Royal National Academy of Medicine

Dr. Joseph Fins, who is a Visiting Scholar with the Health Law Program at the law school this year, was inducted into Spain's Royal National Academy of Medicine at a ceremony in Madrid last month.  He was named Academico de Honor (Honored Academic), which has been conferred on only 18 people worldwide.  Dr. Fins is chief of the division of medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, where he is the E. William Davis Jr., MD, Professor of Medical Ethics and a professor of medicine.  He is also co-director of CASBI, the Consortium for the Advanced Study of Brain Injury at Weill Cornell and Rockefeller University.  While being honored, Dr. Fins gave a talk on severe brain injury in the context of human rights, the subject of his new book, Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics and the Struggle for Consciousness, which will be published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press.

During his time at this law school this semester, Dr. Fins has been working with Professor Abbe Gluck, Senior Health Law Fellow Michael Ulrich, and a select group of students to analyze a Vermont District Court case that led to a settlement between the plaintiffs and the government whereby alterations were made to the coverage determination language in Medicare's Benefit Policy Manual.  The group is currently working to produce the first substantive scholarship on how these changes impact patients with disorders of consciousness.