Barbara Safriet

Barbara Safriet is the public member on the Federation of State Board of Physical Therapy.  At Yale Law School, she served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Lecturer in Law from 1988 to 2006, and was a Dean's Senior Fellow in Law for 2006 – 07.  In addition to her academic administrative duties, she taught seminars on Health Law & Policy and The Regulation of Health Care Providers.  She has served as a member of The Pew Health Professions Commission, and its Taskforce on Health Care Workforce Regulation, and as a Health Law Consultant and Presenter for the Rockefeller Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the Association of Academic Health Centers, the U.S. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, the U.S. Public Health Service, the National Rural Health Association, the National Council of State Legislatures, and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress.  She has served as a member of the Data Safety & Monitoring Committees of the Wilmer Institute's Macular Photocoagulation Study and the National Eye Institute's Multicenter Trial of Cryotherapy for Retinopathy of Prematurity.

At Yale, she served as a Co-Director of the Project on Comparative Public Health Law Curriculum Development for China (1996-99), and as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, the Board of University Health, and the Executive Committee of the Center for Bioethics.

Prior to 1988, she was a Professor of Law for 12 years at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, where she taught administrative law, constitutional law, and health law.

She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Goucher College, a Juris Doctor degree with honors from the University of Maryland School of Law and a Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School.

Dean Safriet has published and lectured extensively on topics of administrative and constitutional law, issues of health care professionals' licensure and regulation, and health care workforce problems.  Her law journal articles include Closing the Gap Between Can and May in Health-Care Providers' Scopes of Practice 19 Yale Journal On Regulation 301 (2002); Health Care Dollars and Regulatory Sense: The Role of Advanced Practice Nursing 9 Yale Journal On Regulation 417 (1992); Impediments to Progress in Health Care Workforce Policy: License and Practice Law, 31 Inquiry 310 (1994).

Most recently, Dean Safriet was one of the principal drafters of the monograph Changes in Healthcare Professions' Scope of Practice: Legislative Considerations (2006), developed through a collaborative effort by representatives of six healthcare regulatory organizations.