Skip to main content

Northern Kentucky University
QUICK LINKS
  • one
  • two
  • three
  1. Salmon P. Chase College of Law
  2. Faculty
  3. Judith Daar

Judith Daar

menu
Judith Daar

Judith Daar
Ambassador Patricia L. Herbold Dean
Professor of Law

Profile

Dean and Professor of Law Judith Daar is the Ambassador Patricia L. Herbold Dean of Chase College of Law. She is the sixteenth dean in the 130-year history of the college. As a law school administrator, she has focused on helping students, faculty, and staff achieve their goals and aspirations; as a professor, she has taught core law school courses and specialty health law courses while concentrating her scholarship at the intersection of law, medicine and ethics. She is widely recognized as an expert in the area of law and assisted reproductive technologies.

Prior to her academic career, Dean Daar was a practicing attorney following graduation from Georgetown University Law Center. She has been an interim dean, associate dean and professor of law at Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, California, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, and a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Los Angles School of Law, the University of California, Irvine School of Law, Loyola School of Law, and the University of Houston Law Center. She became dean of Chase College of Law in July 2019.

Dean Daar has written books on legal and medical issues and published extensively in professional journals. She has spoken at numerous symposia and conferences, and has been involved with the American Bar Association and specialty associations, primarily in areas involving legal issues in assisted reproductive matters and medical ethics. She has also been recognized by students, alumni, and peers for her classroom teaching.

Dean Daar was interim dean of Whittier Law School for the 2016-17 academic year and had been associate dean for academic affairs from 2008 to 2012. As interim dean, she introduced curriculum changes designed to strengthen students’ analytical skills and restructured programming to prepare them for bar examinations.

Her most recent first-edition academic book is The New Eugenics: Selective Breeding in an Era of Reproductive Technologies, published in 2017 by Yale University Press. In 2006, she published the first and to date only casebook in the field of assisted reproductive technologies, Reproductive Technologies and the Law, followed by a second edition in 2013 and a third edition, joined by co-authors, in 2022.

She has published dozens of law review articles, primarily on topics related to bioethics and reproductive medicine. She has written for or been interviewed for specialty and general-interest publications on such topics as stem cell research, genetic testing of embryos, family formation through surrogacy and gamete donation, access to infertility care, and human cloning. Dean Daar is a frequent commentator for media outlets on emerging topics in reproductive medicine.

She has been actively involved with legal and medical issues nationally as chair of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Ethics Committee, as a liaison member of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology Ethics Committee, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a member of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies Committee on Informed Consent.

Her previous leadership roles include two terms as president of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law, Medicine & Heath Care and vice-chair of the American Bar Association Real Property, Trusts & Estates Bioethics Committee.

As an educator, she has received the Teacher of the Year Award of the Whittier student body, the Teacher of the Year Award of the Whittier Alumni Association, and the Jay Healey Distinguished Teaching Award of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics. Her other awards include the Suheil J. Muasher, M.D. Distinguished Service Award of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine for service to the organization.

In addition to a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center, she holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan. Dean Daar and her husband, Dr. Eric Daar, are the proud parents of four sons.