Professor of Public Health Law and Ethics
Director, Center for Public Health Law and Policy
Director, Network for Public Health Law - Western Region
Affiliate Professor, Global Health, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Affiliate Faculty, School of Public Affairs

Through scholarship, teaching, and applied projects, Professor James G. Hodge, Jr. delves into multiple areas of health law, public health law, global health law, ethics, and human rights. Since September 2010, he has served as Director of the Western Region Office of the Network for Public Health Law, one of 5 centers nationally funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Since its inception, the Western Region Office has assisted public health lawyers, officials, practitioners, students, and others across 11 states and nationally on over 2,200 claims. 

Professor Hodge is a prolific scholar, having published more than 175 articles in journals of law, medicine, public health and bioethics; 2 books in public health law; 25 book chapters; and guest edited 4 symposium issues in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, Jurimetrics, and the Annals of Health Law. He is regularly ranked among the top 5% of cited authors in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

As past President of the Public Health Law Association and the Board of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME), Professor Hodge co-chaired the national public health law conference sponsored by RWJF in 2010 and 2014. He also hosted ASLME’s Health Law Professors Conference at ASU in June 2012 (and is scheduled to host again in 2021). With colleagues at the California Department of Public Health, he co-chaired the Public Health Law Summit – Western Region in Sacramento, CA in 2017.

Professor Hodge received the 2006 Henrik L. Blum Award for Excellence in Health Policy from the American Public Health Association; the 2009 Outstanding Faculty Award from the Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and the 2014 Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Charleston (SC) Honors Program.

With others, he has drafted several model public health laws including the Model State Public Health Information Privacy Act, Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, Turning Point Model State Public Health Act, and Uniform Emergency Volunteer Health Practitioners Act.

Over his academic career, Professor Hodge has secured (with others) over $10 million in external funds for diverse  scholarly and applied projects, including extensive work on:

1. Emergency legal preparedness;

2. Legal support for the use of health impact assessments;

3. Legal frameworks underlying the use of volunteer health professionals in emergencies;

4. Compilation, study, and analysis of state genetics laws and policies;

5. Historical and legal bases underlying school vaccination programs; and

6. International tobacco laws and policies.

Professor Hodge is a national expert on emergency legal preparedness, obesity laws and policies, vaccination laws, and public health information privacy. His work on these and other topics has been cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, National Law Journal, NBC News, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, and additional regional newspapers, social media cites, and journals including Science, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, and Public Health Reports. 

He has served on several expert committees of the National Academy of Medicine, Institute of Medicine, as well as CDC’s Advisory Committee on Policy, and is an editorial board member of the UPMC’s journal, Health Security, and the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Professor Hodge regularly publishes a column on public health law for the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. He advises numerous federal, state, and local governments on public health law and policy issues and has lectured extensively on diverse topics in international locations including Sydney, Toronto, Barcelona, Geneva, and Dublin.

Before joining the College of Law in 2009, he was Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center; and Core Faculty, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.