Alexander M. Capron Papers

Alexander Morgan Capron (1944-) is a legal scholar, professor emeritus of law and medicine, and a globally recognized expert in health policy and medical ethics. His research interests include bioethics and the law, public health law, brain death, definitions of death, and organ transplantation.

Capron received a B.A. from Swarthmore College (1966) and an LL.B. from Yale University (1969), where he was an officer of the Yale Law Journal. Between 1970 and 1984, he taught law at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgetown University. In 1985, joined the faculty of the University of Southern California (USC), and retired in January 2023 as University Professor, holder of the Scott H. Bice Chair in Healthcare Law, Policy and Ethics in the Gould School of Law, and Professor of Law and Medicine in the Keck School of Medicine. He was also Founding Co-Director of Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics at USC. Between 2002 and 2006, he was Director of Ethics, Trade, Human Rights and Law for the World Health Organization (WHO), serving as WHO's first director of ethics.

Capron served on several national bioethics commissions, including as Executive Director of the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research (December 1979-March 1983) and as a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (1996-2001). He also served as Chairman of the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee of the U.S. Congress (1987-1990).

Capron was an active member and leader of many organizations in the fields of medical ethics, health policy, and the law. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences), a Founding Fellow of the Hastings Center, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American College of Legal Medicine; and a Trustee of the Twentieth Century Fund. From 1994-2011, Carpon served on the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. He also served as President of the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Vice President of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, and chairman of the Advisory Panel to the Joint Committee on Surrogate Parenting of the California Legislature and the Board of Advisors for the American Board of Medicine. He was a member of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health and of numerous advisory panels on a variety of topics for the Office of Technology Assessment.