Christopher Robertson

Biography

Christopher Robertson is a tenured professor and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health & Disability Law. He is also a Professor of Health Law, Policy & Management in the BU School of Public Health.  In Fall 2025 he is on leave, serving as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

Professor Robertson is an expert in health law, institutional design, and decision making. His wide-ranging work includes food and drug law, torts, bioethics, professional responsibility, conflicts of interests, criminal justice, evidence, the First Amendment, racial disparities, and corruption.  With over 100 coauthors, Robertson is widely published in cognate fields including economics, sociology, and psychology, as well as the biomedical science literature.  His expertise has been featured in the Washington Post, CBS News, and NPR Marketplace.

In 2019, Harvard University Press published Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What Can be Done About It. Robertson has co-edited four books, Nudging Health: Behavioral Economics and Health Law (2016), Blinding as a Solution to Bias: Strengthening Biomedical Science, Forensic Science, and Law (2016), and Innovation and Protection: The Future of Medical Device Regulation (2022), and Health Law as Private Law:  Pathway or Pathology (2025).

Acting in legal reform movements, Robertson has worked for the board of trustees of the California State Bar to reduce racial disparities in the attorney discipline system. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He previously served as reporter for the Health Law Monitoring Committee of the Uniform Law Commission. For over a decade, he has served on the clinical ethics committee of an academic medical center.

Robertson founded and led the development of JD-Next, a national program designed to reduce disparities in preparation for law school and to provide a more reliable predictor of student success. The program is now owned by Aspen Publishing and used by dozens of law schools. With ETS, Robertson also conducted the first major study of the validity of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) as an admissions test for JD programs. Robertson has also pioneered legal education for undergraduates and non-lawyer professionals.

Robertson previously served as associate dean for research and innovation and professor of law at the University of Arizona. Professor Robertson has served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, NYU Law, and the London School of Economics, and as a visiting scholar at the Brown University Policy Lab. He is affiliated with the Petrie Flom Center for Health Care Policy, Bioethics and Biotechnology at Harvard and the NYU Langone Health Working Group on Compassionate Use and Pre-Approval Access (CUPA). Robertson’s legal practice has focused on complex litigation involving medical and scientific disputes, and he continues to provide social science expertise and litigation strategy in a wide range of cases.