Leslie Francis


Leslie Pickering Francis is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor for College of Philosophy and College of Law at University of Utah.
Professor Francis holds joint appointments as Alfred C. Emery professor of law and professor of philosophy, and adjunct appointments in Family and Preventive Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Political Science, at the University of Utah. She was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor in 2009 and became director of the University of Utah Center for Law and Biomedical Sciences in 2015. Professor Francis was President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2015-2016. She currently serves as the elected Secretary-General of the International Society for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy and as a member of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.  She is past co-chair of the Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security Subcommittee of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, where she currently serves as a member of the Working Group on Data Access and Use. Professor Francis also has been a member of the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee and of the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging.
Professor Francis's books include The Patient as Victim and Vector: Ethics and Infectious Disease ; Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know ; and Sustaining Surveillance: the Ethics and Politics of Public Health Data Use.  She edited the Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics and is the author of many papers in the areas of disability law and ethics, privacy and data use, justice, and bioethics.

Education