About

Richard S. Saver is the Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 2010. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Social Medicine at UNC School of Medicine and is an Adjunct Professor of health policy and management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. His teaching and research interests include health law, torts, and nonprofit organizations. Saver has authored scholarship published in law reviews, medical journals, book chapters, and interdisciplinary publications. He co-authored the book 'HEALTH LAW AND BIOETHICS: CASES IN CONTEXT,' which provides an in-depth look at leading cases in health law. Saver received the UNC School of Law's Chadbourn Award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2012 and the Robert G. Byrd Award for Excellence and Creativity in Teaching in 2015-2016. He earned his B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University in History and Science (Biology) and his J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School, where he was a member of the Stanford Law Review. His professional background includes clerking for Judge Eugene Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, practicing in the health law department of McDermott, Will, & Emery in Washington, D.C., and serving as Associate General Counsel for the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he worked on regulatory, transactional, and patient-care issues and lectured on health law topics.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Law
• Computer Security
• Nursing
• Computer Science
• Environmental health
• Accounting
• Psychology
• Medical emergency
• Psychiatry
• Family medicine
• Pathology
• Business
• Medical education
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Health Professionals’ Social Media Claims—Looking at the Underlying Evidence

  JAMA Network Open · 2026-01-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Medical Board Discipline of Physicians for Spreading Medical Misinformation

  JAMA Network Open · 2024 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Medical education

  Importance: False medical information disseminated dangerously during the COVID-19 pandemic, with certain physicians playing a surprisingly prominent role. Medical boards engendered widespread criticism for not imposing forceful sanctions, but considerable uncertainty remains about how the professional licensure system regulates physician-spread misinformation. Objective: To compare the level of professional discipline of physicians for spreading medical misinformation relative to discipline for other offenses. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study analyzed and coded publicly reported medical board disciplinary actions in the 5 most populous US states. The analysis included data from January 1, 2020, through May 30, 2023, for California, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania and from January 1, 2020, through March 30, 2022, for Texas. Main Outcomes and Measures: Medical board disciplinary proceedings that resulted in some form of sanction were analyzed. Codes were assigned for the different types of offenses relied on by medical boards for imposing physician discipline. Results: Among 3128 medical board disciplinary proceedings in the 5 most populous states, spreading misinformation to the community was the least common reason for medical board discipline of physicians (6 [0.1%] of all identified offenses). Two reasons tied for third least common: patient-directed misinformation (21 [0.3%]) and inappropriate advertising or patient solicitation (21 [0.3%]). The frequency of misinformation conduct was exponentially lower than more common reasons for discipline, such as physician negligence (1911 [28.7%]), problematic record-keeping (990 [14.9%]), and inappropriate prescribing (901 [13.5%]). Patient-directed misinformation provided a basis for discipline 3 times as often as spreading misinformation to the community. The frequency of disciplinary actions for any reasons related to COVID-19 care, even if not about misinformation, was also quite low (10 [0.2%]). Sanctions in misinformation actions tended to be relatively light. Conclusions and Relevance: The frequency of discipline for physician-spread misinformation observed in this cross-sectional study was quite low despite increased salience and medical board warnings since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic about the dangers of physicians spreading falsehoods. These findings suggest that there is a serious disconnect between regulatory guidance and enforcement and that medical boards relied on spreading misinformation to patients as a reason for discipline 3 times more frequently than disseminating falsehoods to the public. These results shed light on important policy concerns about professional licensure, including why, under current patient-centered frameworks, this form of regulation may be particularly ill-suited to address medical misinformation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Firearm Policy in the Hospital Setting—Reply

  JAMA · 2024-12-04

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Firearm Policy in the Hospital Setting—Recognizing Health Care as a “Sensitive Place”

  JAMA · 2024 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Medicine

  Importance: Hospitals are hot zones of the US gun injury epidemic. To shelter these facilities from the dangers of gun violence, state legislatures have enacted laws to reduce the carrying of firearms on hospital premises. However, these efforts currently face serious Second Amendment challenges in federal courts. The ongoing legal battles, which have wide-ranging implications for patient and clinician safety as well as public health generally, are setting the stage for a Supreme Court case that may decide the fate of firearm regulations in US hospitals. A permissible pathway for advancing sensible gun regulation in hospitals is urgently needed. Observations: Since the Supreme Court established a new constitutional test for firearm laws in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen (2022), states now face unprecedentedly high barriers to enacting health-protecting legislation regarding firearms. Post-Bruen, the Supreme Court requires that laws be consistent with "this Nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation." This means that states hoping to enact laws barring public carry of firearms in hospitals must demonstrate that hospitals are a "sensitive place" as a historical matter (ie, analogous to a location where firearms were traditionally restricted). By reasoning from analogy, it is clear several historical comparators exist for regulating firearms in hospitals. Although the hospital (as understood today) did not exist in the 1700s, it is sufficiently analogous to asylums and schools, to name a few examples. These settings all share a common denominator with the modern-day hospital: serving vulnerable populations or individuals who may be at heightened risk of misusing firearms. Conclusions and Relevance: The Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms is threatening democratically enacted laws seeking to shelter hospitals from firearm violence. However, it is clear that hospitals and other health care settings are a sensitive place with compelling historical analogies. Policymakers' strategic deployment of the sensitive places designation, along with its rightful judicial recognition in the hospital setting, are critical to upholding laws that protect health care facilities, patients, and professionals from firearm violence-a conclusion consistent with the US Constitution, history, medical ethics, and common sense.

  PublisherDOI

• Patients First, Public Health Last

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-10-27 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  More salient in the era of Covid-19, the question of physicians’ obligations to safeguard the health of non-patients continually vexes courts, scholars, and policymakers. Physicians’ public health duties are confoundingly elusive. Elusive in the sense that while at times affirming physicians’ special capacity and obligations to improve the health of the community, the law more often obscures physicians’ public health duties with ad hoc recognition and insufficient theorization. These public health duties also are elusive in actual application. Physicians can point to individual patient duties as reasons to evade compliance with certain public health laws or to discount public health considerations in clinical decision-making. As a matter of health policy, the law’s directive to “put patients first” has underappreciated costs. It frequently overrides physicians’ more elusive public health duties in ways that facilitate externalization of health risks to the public. This paper analyzes the Covid-19 pandemic, antibiotic resistance, infectious disease reporting, the opioid crisis, and gun violence as disturbing examples. Amplifying physicians’ public health duties to require that they pay greater heed to the population’s health, even to the detriment of doing all possible for their individual patients, seems unavoidably necessary. The nation’s public health system largely depends upon non-governmental actors, and private physicians are at the center of this public/private response. The private physician occupies a unique strategic role embedded between her patient, other patients, and society and performs critical sentinel, gatekeeper, and learned intermediary functions that are indispensable to effective public health protection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Physicians Spreading Medical Misinformation: The Uneasy Case for Regulation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Human Subjects Research

  Springer eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Medicine
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to Provider Conflicts of Interest in Health Care

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020-11-10

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter evaluates provider conflicts of interest in healthcare. Healthcare providers and institutions typically balance an array of competing interests, such as economic gain, the desire to favor colleagues, to advance in one's academic or professional career, or the needs of other patients. Conflicts of interest pervade most healthcare systems and pose considerable risks, both systemic and patient-focused, including increasing costs, harming patients, limiting choice, biasing publication decisions, and eroding trust in healthcare providers and institutions. A key element common to most interpretations of conflicts of interest is the provider's exposure to undue influence from a secondary interest. A second key element is that a conflict of interest can occur when there is merely the perception of undue influence by a secondary interest. Perception that a healthcare provider's independence has been compromised leads to reputational risk and undermines the trust of other stakeholders.

  PublisherDOI

• Provider Conflicts of Interest in US Healthcare

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020-11-10 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter focuses on provider conflicts of interest (COIs) in US healthcare. Physicians practice within a turbulent US healthcare system featuring expanding complexity and commercialization. Potential COIs abound, including financial arrangements with drug companies and third-party payers that threaten to undermine clinical judgment and steadfast devotion to the patient. The chapter explores how the obligation to avoid or manage COIs is not always clear and uniform under US law; instead, it arises from a confusing patchwork of overlapping legal sources, including common law doctrines and regulatory provisions that are often limited in application or impose difficult procedural and proof burdens. The typical legal response to COIs has been required disclosure, but disclosure proves a necessary yet insufficient response with potentially unintended results. The chapter then explains why regulation of provider COIs remains particularly challenging for US health law, including limited empirical evidence about the effect of COIs on healthcare, difficulties in developing proportionate responses, and uncertainty in how to address secondary interests that advance important societal goals beyond the immediate patient's welfare.

  PublisherDOI

• Transparency and Financial Conflicts

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-06-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joan H. Krause

  7 shared

• Joseph Blocher

  2 shared

• Joshua B. Romero

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared

• Daniel Aaron

  University of Utah

  1 shared

• Sunčana Roksandić

  1 shared

Education

• B.A., History

  Yale University

  1972

• Other

  Harvard Law School

  1975

• Ph.D., History

  Harvard University

  1980

Awards & honors

• Chadbourn Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2012)
• Robert G. Byrd Award for Excellence and Creativity in Teachi…