Wendy E. Parmet

Wendy E. Parmet is an American legal analyst, author, professor of law at Northeastern University, and faculty director for its Center for Health Policy and Law.

Career
Parmet is a distinguished professor of law at Northeastern University College of Social Sciences and Humanities and School of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Her field of academics is focused on public health law, with other focuses in health law and disability law. She graduated from Harvard University with a Juris Doctor in 1982.

She was co-counsel for the plaintiff party in Bragdon v. Abbott (1998), where a person was denied healthcare treatment due to having HIV. Parmet was active in advocacy against discrimination and quarantine of those with AIDS during the height of the epidemic in the 1980s.

In 2005, Parmet co-authored Ethical Health Care with Patricia Illingworth. In 2009, she published her first solo book, Populations, Public Health, and the Law. In 2012, she co-authored Debates on U.S. health care. In 2017, she once again collaborated with Illingworth to publish ''The Health of Newcomers.  In 2023, she published another book, Constitutional Contagion: COVID, the Courts, and Public Health''.

She has written for many publications, such as The Washington Post, Health Affairs, Harvard Health Blog, Scientific American, Boston Law Review, The Atlantic, California Health Care Foundation, Bloomberg Law, Cambridge University Press, Brink News, and The New York Times. She has also published papers in dozens of academic and university journals.

Political opinions
Parmet was active in advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic; she stated that she supported vaccine mandates for mitigation of the disease's spread. She was also pro-mask mandate and was critical of the injunction against a national mask mandate filed by Judge Kathryn Kimball in May of 2021. She is pro-choice, and has voiced concerns about the restriction of abortion as precedent for the banning of other forms of contraceptives.

She has encouraged courts to utilise population health-based thinking in its legal analysis as a practical approach to public wellness.

Personal life
She is the daughter of famed American historian and biographer Herbert Parmet and his wife Joan Kronish. She is married to Ronald Lanoue, and has two children. She currently resides in Massachusetts.