Matthew Lawrence

Areas of Expertise

Health Care Finance, Administrative Law, Addictions

Courses

Legislation and Regulation, Health Care Organization, Finance, and Administration, Federal & State Budget Policy Seminar

Biography

Matthew B. Lawrence is professor or law and associate dean of faculty at Emory University School of Law. He is a leading scholar of health law, administrative law, and the regulation of addiction.  His work spans these fields by exploring how the framework rules that govern public institutions—including appropriations law, administrative law, and constitutional law—influence health outcomes in the real world, often invisibly and at scale.

Lawrence was named one of the top 100 legal scholars of 2025 in Willey and Knapp’s citation-based ranking, is currently serving as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and is a coauthor of The Law of American Health Care, a health law textbook centering federal statutory and regulatory law.  His scholarship appears in top law journals including placements at the Columbia Law Review; Cornell Law Review; Duke Law Journal; Harvard Law Review; New York University Law Review; and Yale Law Journal, among others.  His scholarship also appears in leading peer reviewed medical journals including the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics (JLME); the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA); Public Health Reports, and Science. 

Lawrence has extensive, bipartisan federal experience.  This includes service at DOJ during the Obama Administration, OMB during the first Trump Administration, and DEA during the Biden Administration, as well as work at the House of Representatives’ Budget Committee.  He draws from this experience to inform his scholarship, teaching, and frequent media appearances.  In 2023, Lawrence was awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education.  His media appearances include Bloomberg, Kaiser Health News, Nature, The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Lawrence is affiliate faculty at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology, where he was previously a fellow.  He was recognized by the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics as a 2017 Health Law Scholar.  He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Douglas H. Ginsburg on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and is a graduate of New York University School of Law, where he was a Furman scholar, and Brown University.  Before coming to Emory Law, Lawrence was assistant professor of law at Pennsylvania State University (Dickinson Law), where he also held a courtesy appointment as assistant professor at Penn State College of Medicine in the Department of Surgery.

Education: JD, New York University School of Law