Honoring Leonard Rubenstein: Centering Human Rights in Public Health

The Department of Epidemiology recognized Distinguished Professor of the Practice Leonard Rubenstein, JD, LLM, on April 4, 2025, for his contributions to the field, Department, and University. Rubenstein is a lawyer whose career has spanned human rights, health, and bioethics. He received his legal training at Harvard Law School (1975) and Master of Laws from Georgetown University Law Center (1976). His career in health and human rights began with a focus on mental health as staff attorney for the Mental Health Law Project in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s, which ultimately advanced to a role as the executive director through the 1990s.

Rubenstein jointly authored the ACLU handbook The Rights of People with Mental Disabilities (1996). From there, he became the executive director and then president of Physicians for Human Rights, where he served for over a decade. In that role, Rubenstein led extensive efforts to document and address medical complicity in torture, leading a Task Force on Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers and authoring the book, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror. Under his leadership, Physicians for Human Rights was a member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1997. He then became Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace before joining the Bloomberg School in 2009.

At Johns Hopkins University, Rubenstein served as interim director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights from 2022–24, and core faculty of the Center for Humanitarian Health and the Berman Institute of Bioethics. He has instructed several courses, including: Human Rights in Health Professional Practice; Bioethics, Human Rights and Global Health; Current Issues in Human Rights; and Health in Prisons, amongst others. His work now focuses on the protection of health facilities, patients, and health workers in situations of conflict; advancing refugee and migrant health and rights; and exploring the ethical responsibilities of health professionals to advance human rights.

Most recently, Rubenstein founded and chairs the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, tirelessly and successfully advocated for the World Health Organization to begin monitoring attacks on health care, and wrote the book, Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War (2021). Throughout his career, he has demonstrated the importance of not only calling attention to human rights abrogations that impact public health, but to identifying and advocating for solutions to end these abuses—lessons that he imparts to his student advisees and colleagues. Rubenstein's efforts have been recognized by numerous awards over the decades, most recently with the 2024 Carl E. Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award in International Health from the American Public Health Association.