| School of Law: Loyola University Chicago

Nadia N. Sawicki

Title/s: Georgia Reithal Professor of Law
Co-Chair of the Beazley Institute for Health Law & Policy

Office #: Corboy 725

Phone: 312.915.8555

About

Prof. Sawicki’s areas of expertise include torts, health law, and bioethics. Her scholarly work addresses subjects including the law's role in shaping the informed consent process; tort law's limitations in protecting the rights of patients in the end-of-life and reproductive health contexts; the challenges of protecting patients' rights to safe and accessible medical care while also accommodating health care providers' conscientious beliefs; and the state’s role in enforcing ethical norms in medicine.

In 2020, Prof. Sawicki was elected as a member of the American Law Institute. She has previously served as a member of the American Bar Association’s Special Committee on Bioethics and the Law, and co-chair of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ Law Affinity Group.

Prior to joining Loyola, Prof. Sawicki held the inaugural George Sharswood Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught bioethics and public health law. She has also served as a lecturer in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences, practiced law with Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, and clerked for the Honorable J. Curtis Joyner of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Before attending law school, Prof. Sawicki worked as an analyst in the Nursing Executive Center at the Advisory Board Company.

Degrees

BA magna cum laude, Brown University
M. Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
JD cum laude, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Program Areas

Torts
Health Law
Bioethics

Courses Taught

Torts
Health Law: Patients and Populations
Bioethics, Law & Policy

Selected Publications

Professor Nadia Sawicki's SSRN Webpage

Mark A. Hall, David Orentlicher, Mary Anne Bobinski, Nicholas Bagley, I Glenn. Cohen, Nadia N. Sawicki, Health Care Law and Ethics, 10^th Edition (and related volumes) (Aspen, forthcoming 2024)

Conscience Protections for Health Care Providers in the Post-Dobbs Era, Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (forthcoming 2023)

Dobbs Weakens Pregnant Patients’ Right to Medical Self-Determination, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (forthcoming 2023) (with Elizabeth Kukura)

The Politics of Informed Consent and the Limits of the First Amendment, JAMA (2023)

Ethical Malpractice, Houston Law Review (2022)

Rewritten Opinion: Burton v. State, in Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Health Law Opinions (Seema Mohapatra and Lindsay F. Wiley, eds.) (Cambridge 2022)

Tort Law Implications of Compelled Physician Speech, Indiana Law Journal (2022)

State Peer Review Laws as a Tool to Incentivize Reporting to Medical Boards, St. Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy (2021)

A Malpractice-Based Duty to Disclose the Risk of Stillbirth: A Response to Lens, Iowa Law Review Online (2021)

Unilateral Burdens and Third Party Harms: Abortion Conscience Laws as Policy Outliers, Indiana Law Journal (2021)

The Conscience Defense to Malpractice, California Law Review (2020)

Protections from Civil Liability in State Abortion Conscience Laws, JAMA (2019)

Defining the Known Risk: Context-Sensitivity in Tort Law Defenses, Journal of Tort Law (2019)

Everything in Moderation: Dual Role Consent and State Law Mandates, American Journal of Bioethics (2019) (with Valerie Gutmann Koch)

Disentangling Conscience Protections, Hastings Center Report (2018)

Conscience as a Civil and Criminal Defense, American Journal of Bioethics (2018)

Choosing Medical Malpractice, Washington Law Review (2018)

A Common Law Duty to Disclose Conscience-Based Limitations on Medical Practice, in Holly Fernandez Lynch, I. Glenn Cohen, and Elizabeth Sepper, eds., Law, Religion and Health in the United States (Cambridge 2018)