O. Carter Snead
Professor Carter Snead is the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, and Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. He is one of the world’s leading experts on public bioethics — the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods. He is the author of What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, October 2020), which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2020,” and was listed in The New York Times in 2022 as one of “Ten Books to Understand the Abortion Debate in the United States.” He served as General Counsel to the President’s Council on Bioethics (a White House advisory committee), U.S. Permanent Observer to the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Bioethics, and as a member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee. He has testified before the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, and in federal courts on matters of bioethics, law, and policy. He is an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, and an appointed member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which advises Pope Francis on bioethical questions. He clerked for Judge Paul J. Kelly of the U.S Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.