Jay Katz, 86, Yale professor, leader in reproductive law

JAY KATZ (yale university)

NEW HAVEN - Yale Law School professor Jay Katz, who served on a national panel that studied the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on black men, died Monday in New Haven of heart failure, the law school said. He was 86.

Dr. Katz was a leader in reproductive technology law and ethics, Yale said. His scholarship focused on psychoanalysis and law, family law, and law and medicine.

"As a doctor steeped in the law, Jay Katz illuminated better than anyone has before or since the complex of medical, legal, and ethical choices that haunt the silent world of doctor and patient," said Harold Hongju Koh, dean of the law school.

Dr. Katz was born in Zwickau, Germany, in 1922. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1944, earned an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1949, and came to Yale in 1953.

Dr. Katz was a member of a committee that prepared the 1961 Connecticut law governing the privilege between patient and psychotherapist, which served as a national model for the Federal Rules of Evidence, Yale officials said.

Dr. Katz also served on the national panel that studied the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which began in 1932 and was not uncovered until the 1970s. Syphilis treatment was denied to black men in order to study the illness.

He was an outspoken opponent of the use of data obtained from Nazi experimentation and was the first to call for a national board to oversee human experimentation, Yale officials said. He was appointed by President Clinton as a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

Dr. Katz wrote several books, including "The Silent World of Doctor and Patient" in 1984.

Dr. Katz's first wife, Esta Mae, died in 1987. He leaves his wife, Marilyn (Arthur) of New Haven, a son, Daniel of Washington, D.C.; two daughters, Sally Martin Luling of Paris, France, and Amy Goldminz of Boston; two stepdaughters, Mary Whitfield of Seattle and Emily Whitfield of Brooklyn, N.Y.; 4 grandchildren; and one brother, Norman of Milford.