DEI Spotlight: Renée M. Landers, Suffolk University Law School
Each month, the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee (DEIC) will be highlighting diverse attorneys from within our community on the DEIC web page to recognize their achievements and contributions. In honor of National Public Health Week, celebrated April 7-13, the DEIC is proud to highlight Renée M. Landers, a Suffolk University Law School professor who is known for her work in public health law and reproductive justice.
Renée M. Landers is a professor of law at Suffolk University Law School and is the faculty director of the school’s Health and Biomedical Law Concentration and the Master of Science in Law Life Sciences program. She was a distinguished visiting fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance during her fall 2018 sabbatical leave. During spring 2025, she is serving as the Visiting McKinney Family Chair in Health Law at Indiana University Indianapolis, Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Her teaching portfolio includes health law, public health law, reproductive justice, constitutional law, administrative law, and privacy and data security law.
A recognized leader in public law, Landers served as a speaker on the MBA’s Reproductive Justice program in October 2024, as well as a similar program organized by the Women’s Bar Association in July 2024. In November 2024, she was invited by the Princeton Conference, a prestigious annual gathering of health policy leaders, to organize a panel on the impact of abortion bans on hospital reproductive health care services and workforces. Recently, on March 29, Landers was a panelist for a program organized by the Black Law Students Association at Boston College Law School on “Healing the Gap: Exploring the contours of health equity in the Black community.”
An elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance since 2008, Landers is president of the NASI Board of Directors. She was a member of NASI’s study panels on “Strengthening Medicare’s Role in Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities” and on “Health Insurance Exchanges and Changing the Medicare Eligibility Age,” and co-chaired a study panel on economic security. In late 2020, she was appointed a member of the study committee examining “A Fairer and More Equitable, Cost-Effective, and Transparent System of Donor Organ Procurement, Allocation, and Distribution” for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Landers is also a member of the Health Equity Compact, an organization of over 80 leaders of color across a diverse set of Massachusetts organizations — including hospitals, health centers, payers, academic institutions and public health — to advance health equity in Massachusetts.
Landers is the author of articles on the potential for Massachusetts health care reform initiatives to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care, the role of social insurance programs in mitigating economic disparity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and aspects of the Affordable Care Act. In addition to health care, Landers has written on diversity in the legal profession, constitutional law, reproductive health care rights, administrative law, social insurance policy, and privacy, and is a regular commentator on legal developments in constitutional law, health law, and administrative law for media organizations.
As president of the Boston Bar Association in 2003-2004, Landers was the first woman of color and the first law professor to serve in that position. She co-chaired the BBA’s Task Force on Judicial Independence, which issued a report in August 2019. And in 2024, she chaired the BBA program on the Path to Legal Academia. Landers also served as chair of the Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice of the American Bar Association in 2016-2017. In November 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, and in 2021, she was recognized as a senior fellow, the section’s highest honor. She is part of a working group that oversees the Prospective Administrative Law Scholars (PALS) program of the section, which seeks to help lawyers from a wide variety of practice backgrounds and experiences prepare to enter legal academia. She has been a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and currently serves as a Senior Fellow.
She was a member of the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct and served as vice chair of the commission from 2009 to 2010. She served on the task force that drafted the revised Massachusetts Code of Judicial Conduct effective in 2016 and, until 2024, was a member of the Committee on Judicial Ethics, which advises judges on compliance with the code. Previously, she was a member of the Supreme Judicial Court’s committees studying gender bias and racial and ethnic bias in the courts.
Prior to her work in academia, Landers worked in private practice and served as deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration. Landers is a graduate of Harvard College and Boston College Law School.
To review past DEI Spotlights, click here.