Greer Donley is a John E. Murray Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Law at the University Pittsburgh Law School. She is a national expert on abortion and the law. Professor Donley has published widely and been quoted extensively in the media, especially on topics related to medication abortion, interjurisdictional abortion conflicts, and the impact of abortion bans on other aspects of reproductive healthcare.
Professor Donley’s scholarly works have been published in the Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review. Her popular writing often appears in The New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, and Slate. Her paper, The New Abortion Battleground, co-authored with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché, was downloaded over 20,000 times, covered widely in the media, and cited by the Supreme Court’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In 2022, she was the 11th most downloaded law professor on SSRN.
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Professor Donley has regularly applied her expertise to advocacy work. She helped design, draft, and pass the first abortion shield law in Connecticut, which has now been replicated in many states and cities. She also helped draft an FDA Law Scholars amicus brief in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA case and was one of two primary drafters of a citizen petition to the FDA to add miscarriage management to the mifepristone label.
Before joining academia in 2018, Professor Donley was an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins, LLP where she advised a variety of healthcare clients in fraud and abuse, administrative law, and FDA law. She also served as a law clerk for the Honorable Robert Sack on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before law school, she was a fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. She graduated Magna Cum Laude and Order of the Coif from the University of Michigan Law School, serving as an Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law.
Find Professor Donley's SSRN page here.
Find Professor Donley's Twitter here.
Representative Publications
Selected Scholarly Articles:
- Abortion Pills, 76 Stanford Law Review __ (forthcoming 2024) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- Abortion Shield Laws, 2 The New England Journal of Medicine Evidence (2023) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- The New Abortion Battleground, 123 Columbia Law Review 1 (2023) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- Rethinking Strategy After Dobbs, 75 Stanford Law Review Online 1 (2022) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- Abortion, Pregnancy Loss, and Subjective Fetal Personhood, 75 Vanderbilt Law Review (forthcoming 2022) (with Jill Wieber Lens).
- Medication Abortion Exceptionalism, 107 Cornell Law Review (forthcoming 2021).
- Second Trimester Abortion Dangertalk, 62 Boston College Law Review 2145 (2021) (with Jill Wieber Lens).
- Parental Autonomy over Prenatal End-of-Life-Decisions, 105 Minnesota Law Review 175 (2020).
- Contraceptive Equity: Curing the Sex Discrimination in the ACA’s Mandate, 71 Alabama Law Review 499 (2019).
- Regulation of Encapsulated Placenta, 86 Tennessee Law Review 225 (2019) (lead article).
- Encouraging Maternal Sacrifice: How Regulations Governing the Consumption of Pharmaceuticals in Pregnancy Prioritize Fetal Safety over Maternal Health and Autonomy, 39 New York University Review of Law & Social Change 45 (2015).
Selected Popular Media:
- We Need to Talk About Overturning the Dobbs Decision, The New York Times (June 24, 2023) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- The Stakes in The Texas Abortion Medication Suit Are Broader Than Just One Pill, The Washington Post (March 3, 2023) (with Rachel Sachs).
- Actually, One Texas Judge Is Not the Final Decision-Maker on Medication Abortion, Slate (February 28, 2023) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- The FDA’s Step Forward on Medication Abortion Isn’t Even Close to Enough, Slate (Jan. 5, 2023) (with David S. Cohen and Rachel Rebouché)
- The Case Against Medical Abortion Rejects Science and Embraces Falsehoods, The Hill (Nov. 27, 2022) (with Patricia Zettler).
- Why Do We Talk About Miscarriage Differently From Abortion?, The New York Times (Aug. 2, 2022) (with Jill Wieber Lens).
- Reproductive Healthcare is at Risk Post-Roe, Time (June 24, 2022) (with Jill Wieber Lens).
- Abortion Pills Will Change a Post-Roe World, The New York Times (June 23, 2022) (with David Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- How to Save Women’s Lives After Roe, The Atlantic (June 13, 2022) (with Kimberly Chernoby).
- States Want to Ban Abortions Beyond Their Borders. Here’s What Pro-Choice States Can Do, The New York Times (March 13, 2022) (with David Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- Joe Biden Can’t Save Roe v. Wade Alone. But He Can Do This, The New York Times (Dec. 30, 2021) (with David Cohen and Rachel Rebouché).
- Biden Could Expand Abortion Access, Even Without the Senate, The Atlantic (Nov. 28, 2020).