Craig Konnoth, JD, MPhil

Craig Konnoth is a Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. He works on issues pertaining to health and civil rights, law and sexuality, and health data regulation. His scholarship examines how medicine can be used to make normative claims and produce social change. It is therefore harnessed by various groups—from patients to corporations—and can be used in various ways—to oppress and to liberate. His Article, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights appeared in the Stanford Law Review, and another essay, Medicine and Racial Double Binds will appear in the Columbia Law Review Forum. Other publications have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and others. He was also the editor for the Petrie Flom Center’s digital symposium, Understanding the Role of Race in Health, in 2020. 

Before entering academia, Craig was a Deputy Solicitor General of California, where he primarily worked on cases before the United States Supreme Court. He was also the Scott Hitt Research Fellow at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at UCLA Law School. His student work on LGBT history and activism won the Yale Law School prize for legal history. Craig remains active in LGBT rights litigation.

For more information, visit: https://www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/dcs9pr/2994724

Bioethics in Movement Advocacy

Many social movements including LGBT, religious, and especially recently, racial justice movements, use medical frames to bolster their claims—such as describing gender dysphoria as a disability or racism as a virus. Their subsequent ethical claims are thus framed in medical terms. This project considers how these medically inflected ethical arguments relate to bioethics, whether and when they count as bioethics, how social advocates and bioethicists might influence each others’ arguments, and the ethical concerns of such techniques. By considering when ethical arguments grounded in medical frames count as bioethics, this project raises vital questions about the nature of bioethics itself.