Leslie Francis

Leslie Pickering Francis, Ph.D., J.D., holds joint appointments as Alfred C. Emery distinguished professor of law and distinguished professor of philosophy, and adjunct appointments in Family and Preventive Medicine (in the Division of Public Health), Internal Medicine (in the Division of Medical Ethics), and Political Science, at the University of Utah. She was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor in 2009 and became founding director of the University of Utah Center for Law and Biomedical Sciences in 2015. In 2000, she was awarded the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the highest honor given to a faculty member at Utah. Professor Francis was President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2015-2016. From 2011-2015 she served as an elected Vice President of the International Society for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and fellow of the Hastings Center. She is a past member of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and past co-chair of the Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security Subcommittee of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. Professor Francis also has been a member of the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee and of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging. In Utah, she has chaired the Board of Trustees of And Justice for All and the Utah Disability Law Center; she currently serves on the Board of the Disability Law Center, on the Utah State Health Advisory Council, on the Committee on Unrepresented Persons of the Utah State Courts, and as a member of the state courts’ signature program providing representation for people who are the subjects of guardianship proceedings. Professor Francis's books include Sustaining Surveillance: the Importance of Information for Public Health co-authored with John Francis; Springer 2021); Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know (co-authored with John Francis; Oxford, 2017), The Patient as Victim and Vector: Ethics and Infectious Disease (co-authored with Battin, Jacobson, & Smith; Oxford University Press 2010, reissue with new preface 2021) and the edited Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics (Oxford University Press, January 2017, paperback ed. 2019). She is the author of 10 books and over 100 articles and book chapters spanning the areas of disability civil rights and agency, privacy and confidentiality, reproductive law and ethics, justice and non-ideal theory, and public health ethics and infectious disease. Professor Francis also blogs regularly for Philosophy Talk as #francisonfilm.