{"id":70542,"date":"2020-07-15T20:07:36","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T00:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/?post_type=profile&p=70542"},"modified":"2026-06-23T10:11:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T14:11:50","slug":"christopher-robertson","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/profile\/christopher-robertson\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Robertson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Robertson\u00a0<\/strong>is\u00a0a 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.<\/p>\n

Professor Robertson is an expert in health law, institutional design, scientific integrity, and decision making. His wide-ranging work includes\u00a0drug and device law, torts, and bioethics.\u00a0 <\/span>He has also written on professional responsibility, conflicts of interests, criminal justice, evidence, the First Amendment, racial disparities, and corruption.\u00a0\u00a0With over 100 coauthors, Robertson\u00a0is widely published in cognate fields including economics, sociology, and psychology, as well as biomedical sciences. \u00a0His expertise has been featured in the New England Journal of Medicine<\/em> and JAMA<\/em>, as well as the Washington Post<\/em>, Wall Street Journal<\/em>, CBS News<\/em>, and NPR Marketplace<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/span>His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Greenwall Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and AccessLex.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Harvard University Press published\u00a0Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What Can be Done About It<\/em>. Robertson has co-edited\u00a0four\u00a0books,\u00a0Nudging Health: Behavioral Economics and Health Law<\/em>\u00a0(2016),\u00a0Blinding as a Solution to Bias: Strengthening Biomedical Science, Forensic Science, and Law<\/em>\u00a0(2016), and\u00a0Innovation and Protection: The Future of Medical Device Regulation<\/em>\u00a0(2022), and\u00a0Health Law as Private Law: \u00a0Pathway or Pathology<\/em>\u00a0(2025).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Robertson\u00a0is also a published expert on standardized testing and academic success before, during, and after law school.\u00a0 <\/span>He founded and led\u00a0the 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.\u00a0The 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.\u00a0 <\/span>He now consults for Themis on scalable behavioral science innovations to improve success on the bar exam.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

At BU, Robertson previously served in associate deanships, including for international programs and strategic initiatives.\u00a0 <\/span>He served as associate dean for research and innovation and professor of law at the University of Arizona.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s legal practice has focused on complex litigation involving medical and scientific disputes, and\u00a0he continues to\u00a0provide social science expertise and litigation strategy\u00a0in a wide range of cases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14585,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/70542"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14585"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/70542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126001,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/70542\/revisions\/126001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}