Alan Meisel, a leading national and international authority on end-of-life decision making and informed consent to medical treatment, is the founder of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Bioethics and Health Law and the Law School’s Health Law Certificate Program.
Professor Meisel is the principal author of the treatise, The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decisionmaking (Wolters Kluwer), now in its third edition. The first edition won the 1989 Association of American Publishers Award for the outstanding book in the legal practice category. Professor Meisel has published widely in the fields of health law and medical ethics in numerous medical, legal, and ethical journals.
Professor Meisel served on the Ethics Working Group of the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform in 1993. He was assistant director for legal studies at the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine in 1982, where he helped draft the Commission’s studies on informed consent and on end-of-life decision making. A Fellow of the Hastings Center, Professor Meisel has served as a consultant to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment on its studies on Life-Sustaining Technologies and on Institutional Protocols for Health Care Decision Making.
He is also the founder and director of Law School’s Master of Studies in Law (MSL) program, and is the director of the Certificate in Disability Legal Studies program.