Elon Law students who study Health Law & Bioethics with Professor Helen Grant often have one concern top of mind: holding doctors accountable for medical malpractice.

Grant understands the desire for a medical system that lives up to its own standards. There’s just one thing: “Doctors are not infallible, and they do make mistakes, but not every mistake is medical malpractice,” Grant said. “That’s important.”

Of equal importance are complex questions related to topics like organ donation (who gets priority and who is harmed when resources are limited?) and surrogacy (should bodies be treated as vessels and what makes someone a parent with legal responsibilities?).

“It’s not just health law we discuss,” said Grant, a former member of the Queensland Mental Health Review Tribunal in Australia and a founding member of the Elon Law faculty. “Bioethics leads to deeper conversations about how law is informed by societal norms, by morality, by ethics.”

Grant advises Elon Law’s reconstituted Society for Health Law and Bioethics student group and serves on the university’s Mentoring Design Team. She also mentors student leaders of the Elon Law Review as they prepare for a fall symposium focused on public health and questions related to health care, the opioid crisis, mental health, and more.

Wellness and mental health are recurring topics in Grant’s conversations. She’s quick to cite data that causes her concern. For example, the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found:

  • One in five adults had experienced some form of mental illness in the past year.
  • More than 3 million people over the age of 12 had misused opioids during that same period.
  • Nearly 5 percent of Americans over the age of 18 had serious thoughts of suicide.

The legal profession faces its own share of challenges, notably related to alcoholism and mental illness. To that end, Grant encourages her students to be physically active and embrace hobbies to cope with stress.

These recommendations lead her back to health law being more than medical malpractice. “I want students to have what every lawyer has – a thorough understanding of the black-letter law,” Grant said. “But I also want them to have the ability to think about ethical and moral issues and be an advocate for someone.”