Sharona Hoffman, the Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, is among 45 newly elected members of the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI).
The 90-year-old institute comprises exceptional judges, lawyers and legal academics internationally.
“It is an incredible honor to be elected to the American Law Institute, and I look forward to contributing to the organization’s efforts to improve the law,” said Hoffman.
Hoffman, professor of bioethics and co-director of the law school’s Law-Medicine Center, joins eight other law faculty from Case Western Reserve among ALI’s elite membership—including President Barbara R. Snyder.
She will travel to Washington, D.C., in May for the ALI’s annual meeting.
In 2017, Hoffman was recognized by “Bill of Health,” a Harvard Law School blog, as the 14th most-cited health-law scholar and second-most-cited female health-law scholar in the nation.
Hoffman joined the Case Western Reserve faculty in 1999. Teaching courses in health law, employment discrimination and civil procedure, Hoffman was voted First-Year Teacher of the Year in 2011 and 2012.
She also served as associate dean for academic affairs from 2006-09, and won the Distinguished Teacher Award in 2014.
Hoffman received her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, her JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM in health law from the University of Houston and an SJD in health law from Case Western Reserve.
Before becoming an academic, Hoffman was a senior trial attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Houston; a litigation associate at O’Melveny & Myers, a large Los Angeles law firm; and a judicial clerk for U.S. District Judge Douglas W. Hillman (Western District of Michigan).
In 2013, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation selected Hoffman for a scholar-in-residence fellowship in public-health law. She also has twice spent a sabbatical semester as a visiting scholar at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2007 and 2014) and was a visiting scholar at Emory University in 2014.
She has published more than 60 articles and book chapters on health law and civil rights issues. She has developed particular expertise and a national reputation in health-information technology. She also has researched and written about employment discrimination, public health emergencies, clinical research, health insurance and elder-care. Her work has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, William & Mary Law Review and Boston College Law Review, among many other journals.
In addition, Hoffman is the author of two books: Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow (Praeger, 2015) and Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data: Law and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
For more information, contact Colin McEwen at 216.368.4442.
This article was originally published Jan. 2, 2018.