Dr Jeffrey M Skopek

Jeff Skopek is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences. 

His research explores the normative and conceptual foundations of health law, focusing in particular on controversies about what constitutes a harm/benefit within medical care, the health care system, and biomedical research.   He is currently working on a pair of projects on the use artificial intelligence in health care, as well as a project on animal rights.   

Outside of academia, he serves on the Ethics and Sustainability Board at bit.bio, a synthetic biology company that creates human cells for use in research, drug discovery and cell therapy.  He previously served on Astra Zeneca's Animal Welfare Ethics Review Board and the Health and Social Care Advisory Panel for the UK government's Centre for Digital Ethics.

Before taking up his position at Cambridge, he held a three-year Academic Fellowship at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Centre for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.  Prior to that, he served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Lynch of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

He holds a J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. in History (with distinction) from Stanford University. His studies were supported by Truman, Fulbright, Gates Scholarships, for which he is very grateful.

Grants

Wellcome Trust: PI on a £78k project to evaluate how liability could and should be assigned when patients are harmed by the use of machine learning algorithms in healthcare (2019-2021).

THIS Institute: Co-PI on a £187k project to explore how the law of negligence shapes the development and communication of medical diagnoses and whether the law should be reformed (2019-2022).

Wellcome Trust ISSF:  Co-PI on a £175k project (co-funded by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund at the School of Clinical Medicine and a philanthropic donation) to evaluate the legal, regulatory, and ethical frameworks at the frontiers of medical device and drug regulation (2021-23).  

Novo Nordisk Foundation: Co-I on a £650k project within a £4.2m grant funding a collaboration between Cambridge, Copenhagen, Harvard, and Michigan on biomedical innovation law (2017-2023).        

Publications

"Ethical Considerations in the Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Using Speech and AI,"  FAccT '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2023) (co-authored with U Petti, R Nyrup, and A Korhonen). link

"The Frontiers of Medical Negligence and Diagnosis: An Interview-Based Analysis," Medical Law Review (2023) (co-authored with A Mackley,  K Liddell, I Le Gallez,  Z Fritz).  link  

"Differentiating Negligent Standards of Care in Diagnosis," 30 Medical Law Review 33-35 (2022) (co-authored with K Liddell,  I Le Gallez & Z Fritz). link

"Montgomery's Legal and Practical Impact: A systematic review at 6 years,” 28 Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 690-702 (2022) (co-authored with I Le Gallez,  K Liddell, I Kuhn, A Sagar & Z Fritz).  link 

“Untangling Privacy: Losses Versus Violations,” 105 Iowa Law Review 2169 (2020).

"Who Gets the Ventilator? Important Legal Rights in a Pandemic," 46 Journal of Medical Ethics 421-426 (2020) (co-authored with K Liddell, S Palmer, S Martin, J Anderson, A Sanger).

“Big Data’s Epistemology and its Implications for Precision Medicine and Privacy,” in I. G. Cohen, H. F. Lynch, E. Vayena, U. Gasser (eds.), Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press 2018), pp. 30-41.    

“Informed Consent in Research Using Biospecimens, Genetic Information and Other Personal Data,” in eLS (John Wiley & Sons 2018) (co-authored with Kathy Liddell), pp. 1-10.

“A Theory of Anonymity,” in A. Kesselheim and C. Robertson (eds.), Blinding as a Solution to Bias: Strengthening Biomedical Science, Forensic Science, and Law (Elsevier 2016), pp. 249-64.

“Reasonable Expectations of Anonymity,” (2015) 101 Virginia Law Review 691-762.

“Specimens, Data, and Privacy: Introduction” in G. Cohen & H. Lynch (eds.), Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (MIT Press 2014), pp. 189-192. 

“Anonymity, the Production of Goods, and Institutional Design,” 82 Fordham Law Review 1751-1809 (2014).

“Principles, Exemplars, and Uses of History in Twentieth Century Genetics,”  42 Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 210-25 (2011).

“Uncommon Goods: On Environmental Virtues and Voluntary Carbon Offsets,” 123 Harvard Law Review 2065-87 (2010).

“Developments in the Law—Access to Courts: Animal Rights, Aesthetic Injuries, and Anthropomorphism,” 122 Harvard Law Review 1204-16 (2009).

Works in Progress

“Three Challenges for Animal Rights”

"Artificial Intellgence and the Premise of Difference"

Book Reviews

 “Persons, Parts and Property (Goold, Greasley, Herring & Skene, eds., Oxford University Press)” (2015) 74 Cambridge Law Journal 375-379.

 “Philosophical Foundation of Law and Neuroscience (Patterson & Pardo, eds., Oxford University Press),” (2017) 76 Cambridge Law Journal 441-43.