Faculty Colloquium: Dov Fox USD School of Law
Dov Fox
Herzog Research Professor of Law; Director, Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics
Join us as Professor Fox discusses his new book, The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars.
Pitched battles over abortion, puberty blockers, and assisted suicide have turned American healthcare into a legal minefield. Faced with mounting restrictions on medical practice, doctors and nurses who follow their conscience to provide standard treatments risk being fined, fired, or even imprisoned, while clinicians who conscientiously deny evidence-based care are shielded without condition from any such consequences. Dov Fox argues that by ceding the moral vocabulary of conscience to refusers alone, the lopsided law of medical conscience selectively burdens providers, drives vulnerable patients underground, and impoverishes the dynamic pluralism of medicine.
The Conscience of Care lays bare the broken system of medical conscience and sets out to fix it. Fox canvases a landscape of contested services that include IVF, IUDs, opioids, psychedelics, organ transplants, and advance directives. He develops practical reforms that rebalance conscience protection by introducing measured safeguards for providers and scaling back the categorical refuge afforded to refusers. The Conscience of Care articulates a bold vision of medicine that reclaims the lost promise of conscience to bridge social divides on matters of life and death, impairment and identity.
Advance praise:
A cutting-edge ... model [of] respect across political disagreement.
—Reva Siegel, Yale Law School
[G]roundbreaking.... Mandatory reading for anyone concerned about medical ethics and the evolving roles of government in healthcare.
—Anita L. Allen, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Elegantly written and meticulously reasoned, this book ... presents a bold, urgent vision for resolving the[] pressing controversies of our time.
—Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford
Dov Fox’s pioneering work ... could not be more timely.
—I. Glenn Cohen, Harvard Law School
Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics
San Diego is a world leader in biotechnology and medical science, raising hard questions about how to promote or regulate these promising advances.
The Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics brings together researchers and practitioners from local institutions including Scripps, Salk, Illumina, BIOCOM, CONNECT, UCSD, Kaiser Permanente and Rady’s Children Hospital to support research, education and policy measures of special concern to the San Diego community.
Center Director: Dov Fox, Herzog Research Professor of Law; Director, Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics
Dov Fox is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. The author of more than 80 scholarly articles in leading journals of law (e.g., Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal), medicine (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association), and public health (e.g., Foreign Affairs, American Journal of Public Health), his books include "Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law" (Oxford University Press, 2019) and "The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars" (Harvard University Press, 2025).