Bio
Benjamin A. Barsky is Associate Professor of Law and Consortium Advisory Board member of the UCSF-UC Law SF Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy. Barsky’s work sits at the intersection of law, health care policy, and public health ethics. Broadly, his research interrogates the relationship between law and inequalities in health—an issue that he studies using different social scientific methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Currently, his research focuses on how criminal law enforcement shapes health, with a particular focus on policing, incarceration, and controlled substance law.
Barsky is co-leading two grant-funded research projects pertaining to these issues. The first, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focuses on unarmed first-response interventions in health-related emergencies. The second, supported by the Commonwealth Fund, studies the effects of state Medicaid expansions on mortality among formerly incarcerated people. His research has also been supported by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Barsky’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Michigan Law Review, New England Journal of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and Washington Law Review, among other publications.
Barsky is completing his Ph.D. in Health Policy at Harvard University; his thesis is entitled “Essays in Criminal Health Law and Policy.” Before joining the UC Law SF faculty, Barsky was an Annual Fellow at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and an Initiative Fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law. Originally from Montréal, Québec, Barsky became a naturalized U.S. citizen in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2015.
Education
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University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
J.D. -
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
Master of Bioethics -
Johns Hopkins University
B.A. in Public Health Studies and Psychological & Brain Sciences