Call for Abstracts: Generative AI in Health Care

Petrie-Flom Center 2027 Annual Conference  

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce our 2027 Annual Conference, Generative AI in Health Care: Law and Regulation.

This year’s conference is organized by the Petrie-Flom Center’s Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen and Executive Director Susannah Baruch in collaboration with Sara Gerke, Professor of Law and Richard W. & Marie L. Corman Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law; Tina Hernandez-Boussard, Associate Dean of Research and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University; Nicholson Price, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan; and Carmel Shachar, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Health Law and Policy Clinic at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. 

Support is provided by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University. 

Conference Description

Since the early 2020s, generative AI has moved from being a topic of interest primarily to computer scientists to a dominant part of the economy and political discourse, and increasingly a part of health care. This conference and the resulting edited volume will focus on how law and regulation can and should shape the future of generative AI in health care.

Key questions include: How should generative AI be deployed, used, supervised, and monitored in health care? Who should oversee the development of new tools? How might safety and effectiveness be evaluated? What are the best regulatory or other legal structures for governance? Who is responsible when something goes wrong? How should these tools be incorporated into the health care financing, insurance, and delivery systems?

For our purposes, generative AI means artificial intelligence designed to produce output, such as text or images, that normally require human intelligence, typically by applying machine learning techniques to large collections of data. 

The issues surrounding generative AI technology, law, and regulation are all rapidly evolving. Given the fast-moving landscape, we encourage papers that take a longer view, providing legal and regulatory analysis to shape generative AI’s use in health care for years to come. 

All abstracts should ensure they speak to all three elements 

1. Generative AI (as opposed to other forms of AI);  
2. In health care (as opposed to other use cases or social domains); and  
3. Legal issues (as opposed to other issues raised).  

This conference is not about regulating AI generally, nor is it focused on questions of existential risk or frontier-model safety, nor is it meant to be a technical volume. Submissions will be judged accordingly.  

We expect many submissions will address ethical questions, but we are not looking for papers solely on ethical aspects of using generative AI in health care without a connection to the law.   

While the book will focus on U.S. law, we are open to considering comparative law materials, especially regarding the EU, China, and other major centers of gravity.  

Call for Abstracts

We seek papers that offer innovative perspectives and inventive approaches. Abstracts should focus on the fresh contributions the paper will make, including sketches of the supporting arguments. 

Potential topics include

• FDA authority and regulatory design 
• FTC and other legal authority over marketing claims, deceptive practices, and consumer-facing health tools 
• Tort law and its applications to physicians, hospital systems, and developers 
• Contract law 
• Criminal law 
• Licensure and scope of practice 
• Validation before deployment 
• Oversight after deployment  
• Updating of models 
• Human in the loop and its limits 
• Federalism and preemption 
• Insurance, reimbursement, and payment 
• Fairness, bias, and discrimination 

This list is not exhaustive; we hope to receive abstracts related to the conference’s central questions even if the topic was not specifically listed here. Successful abstracts will propose or outline an argument/position, rather than merely stating a topic. We welcome submissions on both broad conceptual questions and more specific law and policy issues. 

To encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue, we welcome submissions from legal scholars and lawyers, bioethicists, philosophers, clinicians, medical researchers, mental health professionals, disability rights advocates, public health scholars and practitioners, economists and other social scientists, government officials and staff, and others who have a meaningful contribution to make. But we emphasize that, whatever the authors’ disciplinary training, the abstract and paper should clearly focus on the legal side of any issue discussed. 

We welcome submissions from advocacy organizations, think tanks, and others outside academia, but emphasize that this is a scholarly conference, and abstracts/papers will be held to academic standards of argumentation and support. 

How to Participate

You may submit your abstract (no more than 3000 characters or approximately 500 words) by submitting this Google form. Please do not submit abstracts by email. Questions may be sent to Petrie-Flom@law.harvard.edu. 

If your abstract is selected, your paper will be due on April 1, 2027, so that it may be reviewed before the conference. All presenters must provide a full draft by that date in order to participate. We reserve the right not to reimburse travel expenses if the draft is not submitted on time.  

Presenters are expected to attend the conference for its full duration and will be assigned a presentation slot for the conference. We will accept conference papers of all lengths and styles (e.g., law review, medical, philosophy, or policy journal, etc). Presentations will be limited to 10 minutes plus time for Q&A. 

The conference will be in person, on the Harvard campus, approximately 9am-5pm on Monday May 3. Participants are expected to arrive in time to attend a dinner the evening of Sunday May 2.  

In the past, we have successfully turned several of our conferences into edited volumes (e.g., with Cambridge, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia University presses). Thus it is possible, although not guaranteed, that conference presenters will publish their papers with us in an edited volume whose chapters will be limited to 5,000 words, including references. All presenters should plan on contributing their submission to any subsequent volume arising from the conference and should not submit an abstract if they anticipate this will be a problem. Previous conference participants have been able to publish their submissions in different formats in multiple venues, for example, both as short book chapters and longer law review articles. However, the version that will be used for the edited volume should not have been published previously or accepted for publication separately. 

Funding

We will pay travel expenses for one presenter per paper who must travel to Cambridge, MA; co-authored papers must name the single presenter. 

Important Dates

ABStract Deadline: December 1, 2026, 11:59 PM ET

Notification of Acceptance: late December 2026 

Full Draft Paper Deadline: April 1, 2027 

Conference: May 3, 2027 

Sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policv, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.