Osagie K. Obasogie

Osagie K. Obasogie is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law with a joint appointment in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health. Obasogie’s scholarly interests include Constitutional law, policing and police use of force, bioethics, and the sociology of law and medicine. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press) was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize by the Law and Society Association. His second book, Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (University of California Press, co-edited with Marcy Darnovsky), is an anthology that examines the past, present, and future of bioethics.

Obasogie is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. His work as a Guggenheim Fellow will look closely at how medical professionals use questionable diagnoses such as ‘excited delirium’ to explain suspicious deaths that occur in police custody, and how this use of science and medicine often obscures, hides, and excuses excessive use of force by law enforcement.