Elissa Philip Gentry

Elissa Philip Gentry is the Kevin Wood and Mary Jo Peed Professor at Florida State University College of Law. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics and is an Associate Member at the Toulouse School of Economics. She previously served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse, France, and a judicial clerk for the Honorable Jane Roth of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, in Philadelphia. She holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Law and Economics from Vanderbilt University.

An empiricist by training, Professor Gentry’s research lies at the intersection of health law, risk and uncertainty, pharmaceutical regulation, and economics. Her work focusing on risk regulation in drugs and medical devices has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty and Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, as well as law reviews like Hastings Law Review and Arizona State Law Journal. Her current projects include empirical evidence on the effect of judicial opinions on pharmaceutical strategy in R&D. Professor Gentry’s other line of research examines heterogeneity in the value of a statistical life (VSL) and a statistical injury (VSI), important metrics in assessing health benefits in regulation. Her work on this topic has been published in the Journal of Health Economics and the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. While the vast majority of her work is empirical, Professor Gentry has non-empirical work examining legal doctrines surrounding medical malpractice claims in Arizona State Law Journal and Indiana Law Review.

Professor Gentry’s work has been presented at health-related sessions spanning both the law and economics fields, including the American Society of Health Economists conference, Southern Economic Association conference, NBER Productivity Seminar, Empirical Health Law Conference, Society for Risk Analysis, and the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis. She has provided testimony to the Florida Civil Justice Subcommittee regarding empirical evidence on consumer responses to attorney advertising. She also participates in judicial education, speaking about the regulation of emerging risks at George Mason’s Symposium on Scientific Methodology and the Admissibility of Expert Testimony.