Elizabeth Price Foley (born 1965, Atlanta, Georgia) is an American legal theorist who writes and comments in the fields of constitutional law, bioethics, and health care law. She is the Institute for Justice Chair in Constitutional Litigation and Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law, a public law school located in Miami, Florida. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Florida chapter of the Institute for Justice, where she litigates constitutional cases relating to economic liberty, property rights, free speech, and school choice.
Foley received her bachelor's from Emory University, her juris doctor from University of Tennessee College of Law, graduating first in her class, and her LL.M. from Harvard Law School.[1] She was a Senior Legislative Aide for health policy to U.S. Congressman Ron Wyden of Oregon and Legislative Aide to U.S. Congressman Michael A. Andrews of Texas.[2] Foley held the rank of Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law and an adjunct professor at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. She joined the FIU College of Law as one of its "founding faculty" in 2002. Foley was awarded a Fulbright grant in spring 2011, conducting research on medical futility at the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Foley's work on the constitutional implications of human cloning have received worldwide attention,[2] most notably her articles, "The Constitutional Implications of Human Cloning," which appeared in the Arizona Law Review, "Human Cloning and the Right to Reproduce," which appeared in the Albany Law Review, and "Does the FDA Have Authority to Regulate Human Cloning?" which appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. In 2005 she served on the Committee on Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research of the National Academy of Sciences.[3]
Her most recent book, The Law of Life and Death (Harvard University Press 2011) examines the many, and surprisingly ambiguous, legal definitions of what counts as human life and death. Foley reveals that “not being dead” is not necessarily the same as being alive, in the eyes of the law. She also explains how the need for more organ transplants and the need to conserve health care resources are exerting steady pressure to expand the legal definition of death. As a result, death is being declared faster than ever before. The "right to die," Foley worries, may be morphing slowly into an obligation to die.
Foley's first book, Liberty for All: Reclaiming Individual Privacy in a New Era of Public Morality (Yale University Press 2006), asserts that there is a "morality of American law", defined by the twin principles of limited government and residual individual sovereignty. These twin principles, moreover, reveal that there is a harm principle that animates American law and defines the moral use of governmental power to restrict individual liberty. In December 2006, the book won the Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty.
Foley is a frequent commentator on constitutional and health care law for American media, including CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.[4]