O. Carter Snead

Professor Carter Snead is the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and one of the world’s leading experts on public bioethics – the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods. He is the author of What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, October 2020), and he has written more than 70 journal articles, book chapters, and essays.

In addition to his scholarship and teaching, Snead has provided advice on the legal and public policy dimensions of bioethical questions to officials in all three branches of the U.S. government, and in several intergovernmental fora. Prior to joining the law faculty at Notre Dame, Snead served as general counsel to The President’s Council on Bioethics and served as the U.S. government’s Permanent Observer to the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Bioethics. In 2008, he was appointed by the director-general of UNESCO to a four-year term on the International Bioethics Committee, and In 2016, he was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life. He is also an elected fellow of The Hastings Center, the oldest independent bioethics research institute in the world.