Widely recognized for her scholarship in disability and health law, Professor Crossley has written extensively on issues of inequality in healthcare financing and delivery, and has published articles in numerous law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Iowa Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review. She is also the author of Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health (Cambridge University Press 2022). She teaches courses on Health Law, Health Justice, and Torts.
Professor Crossley was appointed Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 2005 and served in this role until 2012. She again served as Interim Dean from July 2023 to January 2025. Crossley focused her leadership on initiatives relating to curricular reform, innovative programming, and promoting diversity. In 2013, she was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Public Health Law Scholar in Residence, and from 2014 to 2015, she served as a Faculty Mentor for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Future of Public Health Law Education Faculty Fellowship Program. In 2023, she received the American Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics Jay Healey Teaching Award.
Immediately before coming to Pitt, Crossley was the Florida Bar Health Law Section Professor of Law at Florida State University. Before that, she was on the faculty at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she served for two years as Associate Academic Dean. Before beginning to teach, she practiced corporate and healthcare law in San Francisco and New Haven and clerked for Judge Harry Wellford on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
- JD, Vanderbilt University
- BA, University of Virginia
Education & Training
- American Society of Law Medicine & Ethics Jay Healy Teaching Award, June 2023
- Elected member, American Law Institute, May 2016
Books and Chapters:
- Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health (Cambridge Univ. Press 2022)
- “Embodiment’s Contributions to Appreciating Life with Disability and to Advancing Justice,” in Dis/ability in Media, Law, and History: Intersectional, Embodied AND Socially Constructed? (Routledge 2022)
- “Parental Autonomy, Children with Disabilities, and Horizontal Identities,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability (David T. Wasserman and Adam Cureton, eds.)(2018)
Scholarly Articles:
- The Layered Harms of Nursing Home Segregation, 18 St. Louis U. J. Health L. & Pol’y 275 (2025).
- Affirmatively Furthering Health Equity, 89 Brooklyn L. Rev. 495 (2024).
- Prisons, Nursing Homes, and Medicaid: A COVID-19 Case Study in Health Injustice, 30 Annals Health L. & Life Sci. 101 (2021)
- Reproducing Dignity: Race, Disability, and Reproductive Controls, 54 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 195 (2020)
- Opioids and Converging Interests, 49 Seton Hall L. Rev. 1019 (2019)
- Threats to Medicaid and Health Equity Intersections, 12 St. Louis U. J. Health L. & Pol’y 311 (2019)
- Bundling Justice: Medicaid's Support for Housing, 46 J. Law, Med. & Ethics 595 (2018)
- Black Health Matters: Disparities, Community Health, and Interest Convergence, 22 Mich. J. Race & Law 53 (2017)
- Health and Taxes: Hospitals, Community Health, and the IRS, 16 Yale J. Health Pol’y, L. & Ethics 51 (2016)
- Disability Cultural Competence in the Medical Profession, 9 St. Louis U. J. Health L. & Pol’y 89 (2016) *symposium contribution
Presentations:
- “Health Justice as Barrier Removal,” SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Justice Conference (keynote), January 2025.
- “Barriers to Effective Health Care for People with Disabilities: Signs of Progress in Medicine & Law,” ASLME Health Law Professors Conference, June 2024.
- “Race-Disability Intersectionality as a Health Equity Imperative,” Thornburgh Family Lecture on Disability, University of Pittsburgh, Jan. 2024.
- “Race-Disability Intersectionality as a Health Equity Imperative,” University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix, Inclusive Excellence Speaker Series, April 2023
- “Race-Disability Intersectionality as a Health Equity Imperative,” Pike Lecture, Boston University School of Law, March 2023
- “Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health,” Seton Hall University Law School, March 2023
- "An Equality Directive for Health Care," American Public Health Association Annual Meeting, Nov. 2022
- "Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health," Distinguished Speaker Series, St. Louis University School of Law, Oct. 2022
- "Trustworthy Medicine: Perspectives from the Race-Disability Intersection," British Sociological Association Medical Sociology Conference, Sept. 2022.
Health Law
Disability Discrimination Law
Health Care
Civil Rights
