​Dean Alicia Ouellette's book Bioethics and Disability: Toward a Disability-Conscious Bioethics was recently translated into Japanese.

The book, published in English in 2011, takes on the tension between disability rights scholars and bioethicists. According to some disability rights activists, bioethicists focus too broadly on the concept of patient rights at the expense of the practical challenges facing individuals with disabilities.

“The book explores why this tension exists, and it takes seriously the charge that medicine in general, and bioethics in particular, would better serve people of all abilities if it were more mindful of disability issues,” explained Dean Ouellette when the book first came out.

A leading scholar in the field of bioethics, Dean Ouellette has taught Constitutional Law, Bioethics Seminar, Human Reproduction: Legal and Moral Issues, and New York Practice. She also holds an appointment as a professor of bioethics at the Union Graduate College/Ichan School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai Program in Bioethics.

Before joining the Albany Law faculty, Dean Ouellette served as an assistant solicitor general in the New York State Attorney General’s office, where she briefed and argued more than 100 appeals on issues ranging from termination of treatment for the terminally ill to the responsibility of gun manufacturers for injuries caused by handguns.

She has also worked in private practice and served as a confidential law clerk to Judge Howard A. Levine on the New York State Court of Appeals.