About

Samuel R. Bagenstos is the Arlene Susan Kohn Professor of Social Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He recently returned from a four-year leave serving in the federal government, where from June 2022 to December 2024, he was the General Counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services. In this role, he played a key part in advancing and implementing policies across the Department, including initiatives on abortion and reproductive rights, the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, civil rights, health privacy, Medicare and Medicaid regulations, drug advertising, food safety, and the treatment of unaccompanied migrant children and LGBT youth in foster care. He also contributed to marijuana rescheduling efforts, advised on FDA tobacco enforcement, and worked with the Department of Justice on litigation involving HHS, including significant Supreme Court cases related to abortion rights, free speech, and tobacco regulation. Prior to this, he served as General Counsel to the Office of Management and Budget, where he worked on President Biden's executive orders, COVID-19 aid programs, and major legislative initiatives such as the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Inflation Reduction Act, as well as developing federal budgets and advising on appropriations and administrative law.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• The Dismantling of Civil Rights Protections and Thoughts on Rebuilding

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking the Fund Termination Sanction

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Science and Politics in Public Health Regulation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Health Populism, Health Freedom, and State Power

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Crisis of Appropriations Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Limits of Negative Rights Claims in Social Change Litigation: A Disability Law Perspective on Grants Pass

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Science and Politics in Public Health Regulation

  University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Much of American public discourse takes for granted a distinction between science and politics. People describe and understand that distinction in contradictory ways, however. And those contradictions themselves underscore how closely entwined science and politics actually are.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Litigation for the People

  Dissent · 2020-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Can anti-discrimination litigation be a tool for social change? For many years, a contingent on the academic left contended that the answer is no. The Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS) of the 1970s and ’80s argued that using litigation to enforce rights privileged lawyers, fed an alienating and individualized discourse, and ultimately had a depoliticizing effect. CLS adherents believed that anti-discrimination laws often legitimated, rather than challenged, the fundamental inequalities of society.\nAlthough CLS is no longer a presence in law schools, its ideas live on. Its critique of rights litigation has been bolstered by the opposition to identity politics from some on the left. In the words of Nancy Fraser, today’s neoliberals “[talk] the talk of diversity, multiculturalism, and women’s rights, even while preparing to walk the walk of Goldman Sachs.” A commitment to anti-discrimination “charge[s] neoliberal economic activity with a frisson of excitement,” she writes, and allows it to take on the mantle of “the forward-thinking and the liberatory, the cosmopolitan and the morally advanced.”\nA remarkable new book by Michael McCann and George Lovell offers a different view. In Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism, McCann and Lovell, professors of political science at the University of Washington, trace the history of Filipino workers in the United States through the last decade of the twentieth century, starting from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. This review will not spend much time on McCann and Lovell’s engaging treatment of U.S. imperialism before and after the Second World War. Rather, it will focus on the implications of their argument for how anti-discrimination law can be a useful political tool and not simply written off as elitist, alienating, and supportive of the status quo.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards an Urban Disability Agenda

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Personal Responsibility Pandemic: Centering Solidarity in Public Health and Employment Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Khaled A. Beydoun

  4 shared

• Nina Mozeihem

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Margo Schlanger

  3 shared

• William Yeomans

  3 shared

• Joseph J. Fins

  3 shared

• Gabriel J. Chin

  2 shared

• Gilda R. Daniels

  University of Baltimore

  2 shared

• Nicholas Stephanopoulos

  2 shared