Founding director of the Center for Law, Health & Society Charity Scott is retiring after 33 years with Georgia State Law. Scott was instrumental in developing the College of Law to be the accredited school it is today. The health law program has been ranked in the top 10 in the country consistently over the past decade, currently sitting at the #2 program in the nation.
Scott started the health law program with a single course in 1987. Through private grants and funding from the university’s Second Century Initiative, Scott was able to help recruit ten more faculty over the years for the health law program, which now offers an extensive array of cutting-edge health law courses. Holding joint faculty appointments in business and public health at the university, she developed dual degrees with these disciplines. She created the first certificate program at the law school and championed curricular development around core competencies for health law.
Scott co-founded the nationally recognized Health Law Partnership (HeLP) with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. She was the first director of the HeLP Legal Services Clinic at the law school, which she helped to launch in order to promote interdisciplinary clinical education and public service for law, medical and graduate students.
Scott’s strong commitment to interdisciplinary education was reflected in her long-term collaborations with Emory University’s medical school faculty to teach bioethics in joint classes with law and medical students. She received the Heroes in Health Care Ethics award for her work with Emory’s Center for Ethics.
“The reason I do what I do is because it’s just a lot of fun,” Scott said. “Everything I’ve been able to do at Georgia State and with other educational and community partners has been because it’s interesting and because I’ve felt it’s been important to do. Georgia State Law has given me the tremendous freedom to follow my passions and interests wherever they may lead me.”
Scott had a long-standing commitment to building bridges between academia and the real world of lawyers and legal practice. She helped to launch and develop the health law sections of the both ABA and the State Bar of Georgia, where she held leadership positions for years.
In recent years Scott expanded her teaching and research interests beyond health law. She earned a master’s degree in conflict management and taught negotiation and mediation in order to better prepare law students to resolve clients’ problems and disputes in non-adversarial ways. She created the mindfulness training program at the law school and developed other wellness initiatives for law students in order to support their health and well-being.
“I hope that Georgia State Law continues to put law students at the center of its mission, and that increasingly it will develop programs that nurture students in a holistic way that supports every dimension of their well-being and health, for this will support them both as people and as professionals,” she said.
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