As of January 1, 2003, Larry I. Palmer is the Endowed Chair in Urban Health Policy at the University of Louisville, with appointments in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law, and the School of Public Health and Information Sciences.  Prior to joining the University of Louisville, he was a professor of law at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York.  Professor Palmer is the author of Law, Medicine, and Social Justice (1989), Endings and Beginnings: Law, Medicine and Society in Assisted Life and Death (2000), and numerous articles dealing with law, medicine, and health policy.  Professor Palmer is also the executive producer and author of the study guide of the prize winning educational video Susceptible to Kindness: Miss Evers’ Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.  He is a director of the Hastings Center in Garrison, New York and a member of the American Bar Association’s Bioethics and the Law Coordinating Committee.  Previously, Professor Palmer served as a director of the National Patient Safety Foundation (1997-2002) and a trustee of the Phillips Exeter Academy (1990-2000).

Professor Palmer was a vice provost at Cornell from 1979-1984 and a vice president from 1987-1994.  In addition to his positions at Cornell and the University of Louisville, he has held appointments at the University of Texas School of Law at Austin, the University of Virginia School of Law, Rutgers University Law School-Camden, Villanova School of Law, Emory Law School, The Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg, and Clare Hall, Cambridge University.  Professor Palmer received his B.A. from Harvard College and his LL.B. from Yale Law School.