Barbara A. Reich, J.D.

Barbara Reich is a professor of law at Western New England University School of Law. She joined the law faculty in 2005 and teaches torts and a variety of health law subjects. She has served as a member of Mercy Hospital's Ethics and Social Justice Committee and Ethics Consultation Committee and as a member of Baystate Medical Center's Institutional Review Board. Before joining the faculty at Western New England University, she taught a variety of health law and bioethics courses for eight years at the University of Florida’s Colleges of Law, Medicine, and Health Professions as a lecturer in Law. Reich also has prior experience as a member of a hospital ethics committee and institutional review board at Florida’s teaching hospital.

She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her undergraduate degree in English literature from Union College, summa cum laude. She then spent two years in private practice in Washington, DC, specializing in pharmaceutical and medical device law. Her research interests include legal and ethical issues in end-of-life decision making; comparative end-of-life law; pediatric health issues; racial disparities in the delivery of health care, clinical research ethics and the impact of politics in science and medicine.

Reich was a past visiting scholar at Exeter University School of Law in the United Kingdom and Queen's University School of Law in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She also completed an appointment for Spring 2017 as the Schulich Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She published Intimations of Mortality: Decisionmaking at the End of Life, with Cambridge University Press, in 2022.