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Yale Law and Medicine Host Symposium on Elder Fraud and Abuse

a nurse helping an elderly person using a walker

The Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School will host a symposium “Innovating Elder Justice: Law, Medicine, and Technology to Address Abuse and Financial Exploitation in Today’s Aging Society.”

The symposium will be held on Friday, Feb. 16 at Yale Law School and is co-sponsored by the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Speakers include:

  • Richard Blumenthal ’73: United States senator; member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging
  • Marie-Therese (MT) Connolly: MacArthur Fellow; author of The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life
  • Kathy Greenlee: Former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Aging (2009–2016) and Board Chair of the National Council on Aging
  • Liz Loewy: Co-founder & COO of EverSafe; former Chief of the Elder Abuse Unit at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office; trial counsel in the Brooke Astor case
  • Laura Mosqueda: Director, National Center on Elder Abuse
  • David Owen: Staff Writer, The New Yorker

The conference will begin with a keynote conversation between Sen. Blumenthal and Professor Abbe R. Gluck ’00, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School. Two morning panels bringing together leading authorities and visionaries in the field will follow. Panelists will discuss the root causes of elder fraud and abuse, share some of the most promising and innovative responses to date, and think strategically about how law, technology, and medical expertise can be leveraged to address America’s elder abuse epidemic. 

Elder abuse — which affects roughly one in 10 older adults each year — is increasingly recognized as a major social problem. Those who experience it face hurdles ranging from reporting abuse to recovering from it. The toll, meanwhile, is severe. Regarding financial exploitation alone, between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023 the Justice Department reported pursuing nearly 300 criminal and civil actions against over 650 defendants alleged to have stolen in excess of $1.5 billion from more than 2.4 million victims. 

The symposium is part of the work of The Adrienne Drell ’92 M.S.L. and Franklin Nitikman ’66 LL.B. Elder Law Project at Yale Law School and is supported by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund. Yale is one of the nation’s only leading law schools with an Elder Law Program and is one of only a few academic institutions with a Medical-Legal Partnership that provides civil legal services to the geriatric patient population.

Registration is required. To attend and receive updates, please register here.