Now Accepting Nominations for the 2024 Jay Healey Teaching Award!
ASLME is now accepting nominations for the 2024 Jay Healey Award to be presented during this year’s Health Law Professors Conference.
If you would like to submit a nomination, please email kjohnson@aslme.org by April 5, 2024, with a brief summary supporting the nomination.
For over 30 years, the ASLME Health Law Professors Conference has honored the memory of Jay Healey, a beloved teacher of health law at University of Connecticut Schools of Law and Medicine. Each year, ASLME seeks nominations from its members for the Jay Healey Teaching Award. Members identify individuals that would be appropriate recipients of this prestigious award. Nominees are professors who have devoted a significant portion of their career to health law teaching and whose selection would honor Jay’s legacy through their passion for teaching health law, their mentoring of students and/or other faculty, and by their being an inspiration to colleagues and students.
Jay, a 1973 graduate of Boston College Law School, was one of the organizers of the first Health Law Teachers Conference in 1976 and soon became the spiritual leader of the nation’s health law teachers, who honored him with the Health Law Teachers Award in 1990-the youngest person ever to be given the award. He was a teacher’s teacher, who cared deeply about his students and whose students were extraordinarily fond of him. It was his idea to inaugurate a series of forums at the annual health law teachers meeting to explore values in health law teaching, and his idea to make teaching itself a recurrent theme in the meetings. Working primarily as a professor in the humanities department in a School of Medicine, Jay was described by the executive director of the University of Connecticut Health Center as “the soul of the health center…he set the ethical and moral tone for the entire institution.” His students admired his intellect, but also saw him as a trusted friend in whom they could discuss both professional and deeply personal problems. He was intellectually tough and helped lead the way toward integrating health law with bioethics education in both medical schools and law schools. His writings on patient rights and patient advocacy are classics to this day. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1993, at the age of 46, just 6 weeks after the disease was diagnosed. His legacy survives in the many students and fellow teachers he inspired.
Nominations are gathered and given to a special selection committee. The selection committee is made up of the past 10 recipients of the award. The selection committee votes by secret ballot to select the winner.
To view a list of the ASLME Jay Healey Award Winners click here. For more information about the award or the conference, please call Katie Johnson at 617-262-4990 or email kjohnson@aslme.org.
