I. Glenn Cohen is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called "medical ethics") and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure.

Prof. Cohen's current projects relate to big data, health information technologies, mobile health, reproduction/reproductive technology, research ethics, organ transplantation, rationing in law and medicine, health policy, FDA law, translational medicine, and to medical tourism – the travel of patients who are residents of one country, the "home country," to another country, the "destination country," for medical treatment. He is the author of more than 150 articles and chapters and his award-winning work has appeared in leading legal (including the Stanford, Cornell, and Southern California Law Reviews), medical (including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA), bioethics (including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report), scientific (Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics) and public health (the American Journal of Public Health) journals, as well as Op-Eds in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Cohen is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 15 books. They include: Readings in Comparative Health Law and Bioethics (Carolina Academic Press, 2020) Disability, Health, Law, and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Transparency in Health and Health Care in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Health Care Law and Ethics (Aspen, 2018); Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Law, Religion, and Health in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Specimen Science(MIT Press, 2017); Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics (John Hopkins University Press, 2016) The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Health Care Law (Oxford University Press, 2016); FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies (Columbia University Press, 2015); Identified Versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective(Oxford University Press, 2015); Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2014); Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (MIT Press, 2014); The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues (Oxford University Press, 2013).

For his law school teaching he was awarded the HLS Student Government Teaching and Advising Award in 2017. He also sometimes teaches courses at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. For the public he created the free online Harvard X class Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics, which was nominated by Harvard for the Japan Prize. More than 83,000 students have taken the course so far. You can also watch his Tedx talk, Are There Non-Human Persons? Are There Non-Person Humans? He is also the faculty lead on Zero-L, an online course to help law students transition to law school that is now being used by more than half of all U.S. law schools.

Cohen is also a Fellow at the Hastings Center, the leading bioethics think tank in the United States. He recently finished his role as one of the key co-investigators on a multi-million Football Players Health Study at Harvard which is committed to improving the health of NFL players. He is also one of three editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press and serves on the editorial board for the American Journal of Bioethics. He serves on the Steering Committee for Ethics for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canadian counterpart to the NIH.