Greer Donley is a John E. Murray Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Law at the University Pittsburgh Law School. She is a national expert on abortion and the law. Professor Donley has published widely and been quoted extensively in the media, especially on topics related to medication abortion, interjurisdictional abortion conflicts, and the impact of abortion bans on other aspects of reproductive healthcare, particularly pregnancy loss. Her popular writing often appears in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, the Boston Globe, Politico, Slate, the Hill, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Professor Donley’s scholarly works have been published or are forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, Cornell Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Boston College Law Review, among others. Professor Donley’s co-authored paper, The New Abortion Battleground, has been downloaded over 16,000 times, covered widely in the media, and cited by the Supreme Court’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. She and her co-authors, David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché, regularly work with legislators, advocates, government officials, and abortion providers to identify post-Roe legal strategies and address the interjurisdictional abortion crisis highlighted in their Article. They helped design, draft, and advocate for the first abortion shield law in Connecticut, which has now been replicated in many states and cities, often with their help.
In 2020, Professor Donley won two emerging scholar awards—the Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law and the SLU and ASLME Health Law Scholar Award—for her scholarship on contraceptive equity and the overregulation of medication abortion. In 2021, the Pitt Law graduating 3Ls voted to give her the Robert T. Harper Excellence in Teaching Award.
Before joining academia in 2018, Professor Donley was an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins, LLP where she advised a variety of healthcare clients in fraud and abuse, administrative law, and FDA law. She also served as a law clerk for the Honorable Robert Sack on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before law school, she was a fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. She graduated Magna Cum Laude and Order of the Coif from the University of Michigan Law School, serving as an Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law.
Professor Donley is the director of the joint degree program in law and bioethics and a core faculty member with the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, the Reproductive Bridges Coalition, and the Center for Innovative Research on Gender Health Equity. She is also on the board of the Women's Law Project.
Regulation of Encapsulated Placenta, 86 Tenn. L. Rev. (2019)
The Dysfunctional Medicare Appeals Process: Failed Regulatory Solutions and the Promise of Federal Litigation, 28 Health Matrix 269 (2018).
Encouraging Maternal Sacrifice: How Regulations Governing the Consumption of Pharmaceuticals in Pregnancy Prioritize Fetal Safety over Maternal Health and Autonomy, 39 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 45 (2015).
A System of Men and Not of Laws: What Due Process Tells Us about the Deficiencies in Institutional Review Boards, 7 Nw. Interdisc. L. Rev. 197 (2015).
Marion Danis, Greer Donley & Reidun Forde, Moving Away from Silent Trepidation: Changing the Discussion of Rationing and Resource Allocation, in Fair Resource Allocation and Rationing at the Bedside 400 (Marion Danis et al. eds., 2014).
Marion Danis et al., Exploring Public Attitudes Towards Approaches to Discussing Costs in the Clinical Encounter, 29 J. Gen. Internal Med. 223 (2014).
Does the Constitution Protect Abortions Based on Fetal Anomaly? Examining the Potential for Disability-Selective Abortion Bans in the Age of Prenatal Whole Genome Sequencing, 20 Mich. J. Gender & L. 291 (2013).
Greer Donley, Sara Chandros Hull & Benjamin E. Berkman, Prenatal Whole Genome Sequencing: Just Because We Can, Should We?, 42 Hastings Ctr. Report 28 (2012).
Greer Donley & Marion Danis, Making the Case for Talking to Patients about the Costs of End-of-Life Care, 39 J.L. Med. & Ethics 183 (2011).