As a holiday gift to all of our cherished members and readers, we are proud to present the single largest collection of writing that has ever been presented under a single banner in the history of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. Our massive regular issue and supplement together contain three separate symposiums, each highlighting a different strength of the multidisciplinary approach of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics. We hope you all enjoy the diverse offerings contained in the following pages.
In our regular issue, we first present the symposium “The Promise and Challenges of Microbiome-Based Therapies,” guest-edited by former ASLME President Diane E. Hoffmann. This is followed by a second symposium, “Regulation of International Direct-to-Participant Genomic Research,” guest-edited by another former ASLME President, Mark A. Rothstein, as well as our longtime friend Bartha Maria Knoppers. These two collections of papers are rather different; the first closely examines a challenge in cutting-edge scientific-medical research, while the second surveys and collects information about the regulation of genomic research across the globe. While the former demonstrates the incredible depth of knowledge of our authors on a pressing issue in medical ethics and law, the latter suggests the great breadth of expertise our editors are able to assemble in order to survey the laws of over thirty-one nations across the world. As if this wasn't enough, we are also pleased to present you with a novel supplement to JLME, which presents a collection of current hot topics that were explored at ASLME's 2019 Health Law Professors Conference. The collection's editor, John Blum, a Healey-award winning professor of law at the host institution of the conference and sponsor of the supplement, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, writes that “this issue offers a representative sample of some of the outstanding works presented at the June 2019 meeting and… offers a synopsis of key scholarly directions being pursued in the health law academy, and in so doing provide readers with a sense of the ever widening parameters of this discipline.”
I would be remiss if I closed before introducing one additional feature to the pages of JLME. We are pleased to add another regular column to our ever-increasing lineup of regular features produced by our disciplines' top minds. This new column will be called “Global Health Law” and shall be edited by Benjamin Mason Meier and former ASLME Executive Director Lawrence O. Gostin. The aims of the column are to “frame the new field of global health law and outline the leading global health threats that will be explored in future columns, demonstrating the power of this emerging field in conceptualizing the legal response to global health.” We hope you enjoy this new feature, and in fact enjoy everything in this large collection as you welcome the new year.
