AHLA Vaccine, Vaccination, and Immunization Law (AHLA Members)

Author Brian Dean Abramson is principal of Vaccination Program Counsel, an adjunct professor of vaccine law at the Florida International University College of Law, and a frequent author and speaker on vaccine law. He was a legal editor for Bloomberg BNA from 2013 until 2016, during which time he authored the Vaccine Injury Claims chapter for Matthew H. Solomson's 2016 treatise, Court of Federal Claims: Jurisdiction, Practice, and Procedure. From 2010 to 2012, Professor Abramson was a law clerk for the Honorable Pauline Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where he took an exceptional interest in the court's vaccine injury docket and assisted with most of the cases arising in that area assigned to chambers during his clerkship.

Prior to his clerkship, Professor Abramson earned a J.D. summa cum laude from the Florida International University College of Law in 2005, practiced intellectual property law with what is now Lott & Fischer from 2005 to 2007. He earned an LL.M. in intellectual property law with highest honors from the George Washington University Law School in 2009, and interned for the Honorable Susan G. Braden of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in 2010.

Coauthor Dorit Rubinstein Reiss is a professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She earned an undergraduate degree in Law and Political Science from the Faculty of Law in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she served as Editor in Chief of the Law Review. She then clerked for a year and a half in the Israeli Ministry of Justice’s Department of Public Law, working on a variety of constitutional and administrative law issues. She earned a Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at U.C. Berkeley.

Professor Reiss' initial research examined accountability of agencies at the state, national and international level, with agencies studied including the CPUC, the FAA, and other agencies in the United States and Europe. Increasingly, however, her research and activities are focused on legal and policy issues related to vaccines. She writes about school mandates, policy responses to non-vaccinating, tort issues and administrative issues related to vaccines.

Coauthor Peter O. Safir is senior counsel to the firm of Covington & Burling. Mr. Safir has practiced in the food and drug field for over 30 years and is widely recognized in the pharmaceutical industry as one of the leading food and drug regulatory lawyers in the country. In recent years, he has worked primarily with the research-based pharmaceutical industry concentrating on marketing practices, life cycle management, and issues involving drug quality and manufacturing. Mr. Safir has conducted numerous internal investigations for pharmaceutical and medical device companies involving fraud and abuse, advertising, and promotional practices. He has defended enforcement actions in the marketing and manufacturing areas, representing both companies and corporate executives targeted by the FDA.

Mr. Safir has published and spoken widely in the area of drug regulation and has been a professorial lecturer in food and drug law at the George Washington University Law School since 1991. Mr. Safir is a graduate of Princeton University and the Yale Law School.

Coauthor John R. Thomas is a professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has served as the inaugural Thomas Alva Edison Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; law clerk to Chief Judge Helen W. Nies of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; and visiting researcher for the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. He has also served as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo, Japan, and at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany. He has been a member of the visiting faculties of the law schools of Cornell University and the University of Tokyo.

Professor Thomas holds a B.S. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon, a J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, and an LL.M. with highest honors from the George Washington University. Pharmaceutical Patent Law is one of his six books concerning intellectual property law.