Laura Hermer is a professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her current research focuses on reproductive rights and access to health coverage and care in the United States, with a particular focus on underserved populations and population health. One of 10 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Faculty Fellows in the Future of Public Health Law Teaching in 2014-2015, she founded and obtained funding for Mitchell Hamline School of Law’s medical-legal partnership with United Family Medicine.
Prior to her appointment at Mitchell Hamline, Hermer was an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health and a member of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. There, among other work, she developed and directed the School of Medicine’s curriculum in health economics and policy, was the principal investigator on a multi-year grant from the Texas Department of State Health Services to track and study secondhand smoke ordinances in the state, and directed the Graduate School of Biomedical Science’s intensive, required course in scientific integrity.
Courses taught include Torts: The Common Law Process; Health Law: Organization and Finance; Seminar: Reproductive Rights; Community Health and Vulnerable Populations; and Seminar: Current Topics in Bioethics. Recent articles include Abortion and Embodiment (published in the American Journal of Bioethics); Municipal Anti-Abortion Ordinances: When Local Control Clashes with State Power (published in American University’s Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law); Intentional Parenthood, Contingent Fetal Personhood, and the Right to Reproductive Self-Determination (published in the University of Michigan’s Journal of Law Reform); and Covid-19, Abortion, and Public Health in the Culture Wars (an invited article for the Mitchell Hamline Law Review).