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Liza Vertinsky is a professor of law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Prior to joining Maryland Carey Law, Liza was a member of the Emory law faculty, which she joined in 2007 after a decade of legal practice in Boston working in the areas of intellectual property transactions and technology transfer. Her areas of expertise include the regulation of emerging technologies, healthcare markets and health policy, biomedical innovation, global health, intellectual property, and law and economics. Vertinsky’s research program is motivated by a deep interest in how legal rules influence the ways in which individuals and groups organize their economic activities. She initially pursued this interest during PhD research on the economic organization of non-traditional groups such as street gangs. Since joining the legal academy she has focused primarily on exploring the institutional environments within which alternative forms of intellectual production and innovation take place, particularly within healthcare markets. Vertinsky has a strong interest in the intersection of law and global health and development, and since coming to Emory she has helped to develop Emory's global health law and policy project. This project incorporates curriculum, scholarship, and partnership building around contemporary issues of global health law. She is also affiliated with Emory's Vulnerability Project, where she explores the connection between innovation and vulnerability and the roles that intellectual property does and/or can play in addressing or impeding access to health and economic development. Vertinsky clerked for Judge Stanley Marcus, first for the US District Court in the Southern District of Florida and then for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Genetic paparazzi are right around the corner, and courts aren’t ready to confront the legal quagmire of DNA theft

Liza Vertinsky and Yaniv Heled are law professors who study how emerging technologies like genetic sequencing are regulated. They believe that growing public interest in genetics has increased the likelihood that genetic paparazzi with DNA collection kits may soon become as ubiquitous as ones with cameras. While courts have for the most part managed to evade dealing with the complexities of surreptitious DNA collection and testing of public figures, they won’t be able to avoid dealing with it for much longer. And when they do, they are going to run squarely into the limitations of existing legal frameworks when it comes to genetics.

Subjects: Courts & Technology, Criminal Law, Discovery, Ethics, Legal Research, Privacy