Polly Price named Andrew Carnegie Fellow

Polly J. Price 86C 86G, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and professor of global health at Emory University, has been named one of 35 recipients of the 2017 Andrew Carnegie fellowship.

The program recognizes an exceptional group of both established and emerging scholars, journalists, and authors with the goal of strengthening US democracy, driving technological and cultural creativity, exploring global connections and global ruptures, and improving natural and human environments.

Price will use her award to write a book about how governments confront the challenge of contagious disease, titled Governing Disease: Epidemics, Law, and the Challenge of Disease Control in a Democratic Society.

“The book’s premise is that we have much to learn from the study of governmental response to public health crises in the past,” says Price. Drawing from historical examples, the book will provide a set of important lessons for lawmakers.

“The goal is to help initiate, encourage, and frame the terms of public debate on how governments can best respond to health threats in the future,” Price says.

As a professor of both law and global health, Price is well placed to provide insights on government responses to epidemics. She also serves as a faculty member in health law and regulatory policy with the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center.

In 2013, Price was one of six professors chosen for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholar-in-Residence Program in public health law. In that capacity, she worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and the US-Mexico Border Health Commission to study tuberculosis control measures along the southern US border.

Price’s book will present three examples to shed light on both successes and failures in government responses to past epidemics: yellow fever in the 19th century, tuberculosis and the modern challenge of antibiotic drug resistance, and HIV/AIDS.

Faculty members honored

Mary Dudziak

Mary Dudziak, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, has been elected the new president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. She takes up that position following her current post as vice president. The society seeks to promote “the study, advancement and dissemination of knowledge of American Foreign Relations,” including through the sponsorship of research, annual meetings, and publications. Dudziak is a leading US legal historian whose research is at the intersection of domestic law and US international affairs.

Jim Elliott

A. James Elliott 63C 66L has been honored by the Committee to Promote Inclusion in the Profession of the State Bar of Georgia with the Randolph Thrower Lifetime Achievement Award. Elliott is a cofounder of Georgia’s Legal Services Program, which has provided legal services to almost one million indigent Georgians, and of Georgia’s mandatory IOLTA program, which has raised $100 million for legal services programs and other legal charities. He is a fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers as well as the American and Georgia Bar Foundations.

Randee Waldman

Randee J. Waldman, clinical professor of law and director of Emory Law’s Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic, was recognized with the Champion of Justice Award during the fall of the 2016 – 17 school year. The award is given by the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC), a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. The center was created in the late 1990s “to respond to the critical need to build the capacity of the juvenile defense bar and to improve access to counsel and quality of representation for children in the justice system.”

John Witte Jr.

John Witte Jr., Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion received an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University. He grew up with the Heidelberg Catechism, and he spent a semester at the university as a von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellow in 1999. While there, Witte researched his first major book on law and the Reformation, Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge University Press 2002), under the guidance of theologian Wolfgang Huber and others.