James F. Blumstein

University Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law and Health Law & Policy
Professor of Management, Owen Graduate School of Management
Director, Vanderbilt Health Policy Center

Jim Blumstein ranks among the nation’s most prominent scholars of health law, law and medicine, and voting rights. He was the first in the Law School to be awarded the title of University Professor in 2003 and the first to receive a second tenured appointment in Vanderbilt Medical School. The director of Vanderbilt’s Health Policy Center, Professor Blumstein has served as the principal investigator on numerous grants concerning managed care, hospital management and medical malpractice. His peers recognized his leadership in health law and policy by electing Blumstein to the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), and he was awarded the Earl Sutherland Prize, which is Vanderbilt’s preeminent university-wide recognition for lifetime scholarly contributions. In 2007, he received the prestigious McDonald-Merrill-Ketcham Memorial Award for Excellence in Law and Medicine from the Indiana University and delivered the award lecture on hospital-physician joint-venture relationships. Blumstein has been the Olin Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, an adjunct professor at Dartmouth Medical School, and a visiting professor at Duke Law School and at Duke’s Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs. He has served as former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen’s counsel on TennCare reform and has participated actively in a number of Supreme Court cases, arguing three. In 2014, Blumstein received a secondary appointment as a professor of management at the Owen Graduate School of Management. A dedicated teacher, Blumstein has received the law school’s student-sponsored Hall-Hartman Teaching Award. He joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 1970.

50th Anniversary of Dunn v. Blumstein
Tennessee Voices: A Conversation with James Blumstein, podcast hosted by David Plazas, opinion and engagement director, The Tennessean, May 11, 2022.

Representative Publications

• "Enforcing Limits on the Affordable Care Act’s Mandated Medicaid Expansion: The Coercion Principle and the Clear Notice Rule," 2011-2012 Cato Supreme Court Review 67 (2012)
  Full Text | WWW
• “Of Doctors and Hospitals: Setting the Analytical Framework for Managing and Regulating the Relationship" in The Fragmentation of U.S. Health Care: Causes and Solutions, Oxford University Press (2010) (Einer Elhauge, editor) (derived from the McDonald-Merrill-Ketcham Lecture delivered at Indiana University and published in the Indiana Health Law Review)
  Full Text | HEIN | WWW
• "Medical Malpractice Standard-Setting: Developing Malpractice 'Safe Harbors' As a New Role for QIOs?" 59 Vanderbilt Law Review 1017 (2006)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "The Legal Liability Regime: How Well Is It Doing in Assuring Quality, Accounting for Costs, and Coping with an Evolving Reality in the Health Care Marketplace?" 11 Annals of Health Law 125 (2002)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Regulatory Review by the Executive Office of the President: An Overview and Policy Analysis of the Legal and Institutional Issues," 51 Duke Law Journal 851 (2001)
  Full Text | HEIN
• "Health Care Reform through Medicaid Managed Care: Tennessee (TennCare) as a Case Study and a Paradigm," 53 Vanderbilt Law Review 125 (2000) (with F. Sloan)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• Health Care Law and Policy (2nd edition, Foundation Press, 1998 & 2007 supp.) (co-edited with C. Havighurst & T. Brennan)
• "Health Care Reform and Competing Visions of Medical Care: Antitrust and State Provider Cooperation Legislation," 79 Cornell Law Review 1459 (1994)
  Full Text | HEIN
• "Defining and Proving Race Discrimination: Perspectives on the Purpose vs. Results Approach from the Voting Rights Act," 69 Virginia Law Review 633 (1983)
  Full Text | HEIN
• "Distinguishing Government's Responsibility in Rationing Public and Private Medical Resources," 60 Texas Law Review 899 (1982)
  Full Text | HEIN