Abbe Gluck

Abbe R. Gluck is the Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and the founding Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School. She is also Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine) at Yale School of Medicine and a Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale.

From November 2020 until November 2021, she served in the Biden Administration as Special Counsel to the President. In that capacity, Gluck was the lead lawyer for the White House COVID-19 Response, first for the Biden-Harris Transition and then in the White House, as Special Counsel to the White House COVID-19 Response Team. Gluck also simultaneously served as a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, where she was additionally responsible for litigation and policy relating to health care, USDA, and Veterans Affairs across the administration.

In 2012, Gluck founded and still directs the Yale Law School Medical Legal Partnership Program, a poverty legal services clinic that spans seven sites in New Haven. She joined Yale Law School in 2012, having previously held senior positions in government and served on the faculty of Columbia Law School. She is an expert on state courts and federalism, Congress and the political process, civil procedure, and health law, and is the chair emerita of Section on Legislation and the Law of the Political Process for the Association of American Law Schools.

Gluck has extensive experience working as a lawyer in all levels of government. Prior to joining Columbia, she served in the administration of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine as the special counsel and senior advisor to the New Jersey Attorney General; and in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as chief of staff and counsel to the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, senior counsel to the NYC Corporation Counsel in the New York City Office of Legal Counsel, and deputy special counsel to the New York City Charter Revision Commission. Prior to law school, she worked in the U.S. Senate for Senator Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland. Before returning to government work after law school, Professor Gluck was associated with the Paul Weiss firm in New York. She earned her B.A. from Yale University, summa cum laude, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, she clerked for then-Chief Judge Ralph K. Winter on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Her newest book COVID-19 and Law: Disruption, Impacts, Legacy (with Cohen et al.), will be published in 2023, following The Trillion Dollar Revolution: How the Affordable Care Act Transformed Politics, Law, and Health Care in America, with Zeke Emanuel, and A New Deal For Cancer: Lessons from a 50 Year War (with Charles Fuchs) in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Gluck’s scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and many other journals. Among her most recent work are pioneering studies on the topics of multidistrict litigation in state and federal courts; the inequalities produced by unpublished judicial opinions; and foundational work on gun violence and the opioid crisis in state and federal courts. In 2013, she concluded most extensive empirical study ever conducted about the realities of the congressional law-making process (published as two articles in the Stanford Law Review) her 2017 study, published in the Stanford Law Review, is the comprehensive account of the state implementation of the Affordable Care Act. She is co-author of a leading Legislation casebook, and has served as co-counsel on several major health-law cases, including filing influential amicus briefs in the 2019 constitutional challenge, Texas v. Azar, King, and the 2012 ACA challenge, NFIB v. Sebelius. Gluck’s work is among the most relied upon by courts and scholars in the country, and she has appeared on several “most cited” lists in her areas of expertise.

Professor Gluck currently serves on numerous boards and commissions, including the two premier state lawmaking organizations in the country, as an appointed member of both the Uniform Law Commission, where she serves as Chair of the Health Law Committee and as an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI, where she was elected to the ALI leadership body the Council, in 2018. She also is Vice Chair of the Fund for Modern Courts in New York City, an appointed member of the New York State Taskforce on Life and the Law, an active member of the New York City Bar Association, Gluck received the Law School’s teaching award in 2015.