Call for Abstracts: Generative AI in Health Care, Petrie-Flom Center 2027 Conference, Harvard Law School [in person; 3 May 2027]

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is holding its 2027 Annual Conference, Generative AI in Health Care: Law and Regulation. It is organized by the Center’s Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen and Executive Director Susannah Baruch in collaboration with Sara Gerke (University of Illinois College of Law), Tina Hernandez-Boussard (Stanford University), Nicholson Price (University of Michigan) and Carmel Shachar (Harvard Law School). Support is provided by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.

Since the early 2020s, generative AI has moved from being a topic of interest primarily to computer scientists to a dominant part of the economy and political discourse, and increasingly a part of health care. The conference and the resulting edited volume will focus on how law and regulation can and should shape the future of generative AI in health care.

• How should generative AI be deployed, used, supervised, and monitored in health care?
• Who should oversee the development of new tools?
• How might safety and effectiveness be evaluated?
• What are the best regulatory or other legal structures for governance?
• Who is responsible when something goes wrong?
• How should these tools be incorporated into the health care financing, insurance, and delivery systems?

Generative AI here means artificial intelligence designed to produce output, such as text or images, that normally require human intelligence, typically by applying machine learning techniques to large collections of data. Because the landscape is fast-moving, papers that take a longer view, providing legal and regulatory analysis to shape generative AI’s use in health care for years to come, are encouraged.

All abstracts should speak to all three elements:

• Generative AI (as opposed to other forms of AI)
• In health care (as opposed to other use cases or social domains)
• Legal issues (as opposed to other issues raised)

The conference is not about regulating AI generally, nor is it focused on questions of existential risk or frontier-model safety, nor is it meant to be a technical volume. Many submissions are expected to address ethical questions, but papers solely on ethical aspects without a connection to the law are not sought. The book will focus on U.S. law, but comparative law materials are welcome, especially regarding the EU, China, and other major centers of gravity.

• FDA authority and regulatory design
• FTC and other legal authority over marketing claims, deceptive practices, and consumer-facing health tools
• Tort law and its applications to physicians, hospital systems, and developers
• Contract law
• Criminal law
• Licensure and scope of practice
• Validation before deployment
• Oversight after deployment
• Updating of models
• Human in the loop and its limits
• Federalism and preemption
• Insurance, reimbursement, and payment
• Fairness, bias, and discrimination

The list is not exhaustive. Successful abstracts propose or outline an argument or position, rather than merely stating a topic. Both broad conceptual questions and more specific law and policy issues are welcome.

To encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue, submissions are welcome from legal scholars and lawyers, bioethicists, philosophers, clinicians, medical researchers, mental health professionals, disability rights advocates, public health scholars and practitioners, economists and other social scientists, government officials and staff, and others who have a meaningful contribution to make. Whatever the authors’ disciplinary training, the abstract and paper should clearly focus on the legal side of any issue discussed.

Advocacy organizations, think tanks, and others outside academia are welcome to submit, but this is a scholarly conference, and abstracts and papers are held to academic standards of argumentation and support.

Submit an abstract of no more than 3000 characters (approximately 500 words) through the Google form. Do not submit abstracts by email. The form asks for the corresponding author’s last name, first name, email address, and position and institution; the details of any additional authors; the abstract title; and the abstract. Abstracts should focus on the fresh contributions the paper will make, including sketches of the supporting arguments. Questions may be sent to Petrie-Flom@law.harvard.edu.

• If an abstract is selected, the full paper is due on April 1, 2027, so that it can be reviewed before the conference. All presenters must provide a full draft by that date in order to participate.
• Conference papers of all lengths and styles are accepted, for example law review, medical, philosophy, or policy journal.
• Presenters are expected to attend the full duration of the conference and are assigned a presentation slot. Presentations are limited to 10 minutes plus time for Q&A.
• The conference is in person, on the Harvard campus, approximately 9am-5pm on Monday May 3. Participants are expected to arrive in time to attend a dinner the evening of Sunday May 2.

Travel expenses are paid for one presenter per paper who must travel to Cambridge, MA; co-authored papers must name the single presenter. The Center reserves the right not to reimburse travel expenses if the draft is not submitted on time.

The Center has previously turned several of its conferences into edited volumes (for example with Cambridge, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia University presses). It is possible, although not guaranteed, that conference presenters will publish their papers in an edited volume whose chapters will be limited to 5,000 words, including references. All presenters should plan on contributing their submission to any subsequent volume and should not submit an abstract if they anticipate this will be a problem. The version used for the edited volume should not have been published previously or accepted for publication separately, although previous participants have published their submissions in different formats in multiple venues.

• Abstract deadline: December 1, 2026, 11:59 PM ET
• Notification of acceptance: late December 2026
• Full draft paper deadline: April 1, 2027
• Conference: May 3, 2027