Gordon Bonnyman earned the baccalaureate degree from Princeton. He earned his law degree from UT in 1972. He began working for Legal Services in 1973 and represented low-income individuals on a wide variety of civil matters. In 1995 he and Michelle Johnson (UT Law, 1994) founded the Tennessee Justice Center, a nonprofit public interest law firm serving low-income families, funded primarily by the Tennessee Bar Association’s Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts program. Bonnyman served as executive director from 1995 to 2013.
Bonnyman has focused on health care financing, quality, and access. He has been involved in numerous major health care litigations, including cases related to revision of federal Hill-Burton regulations governing hospital provision of indigent care, challenging conditions in facilities for people with mental disabilities, barring racial discrimination in long-term care, challenging Medicaid mothers’ lack of access to prenatal care, enforcing federal and state nursing home standards, establishing procedural rights for Medicaid beneficiaries, challenging hospital pricing and patient dumping practices, seeking minority health data from federally-funded health care providers, and protecting Medicare and Medicaid home health benefits. He has served as counsel for Medicaid beneficiaries with disabilities before the US Supreme Court; has represented nursing home reform group and low-income health care consumer coalitions before legislative and administrative agencies; and has served as an advocate for beneficiaries in the implementation of TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid managed care program. He has lectured and consulted on health law and policy, testified at congressional hearings on health and civil rights, and has served on numerous national and state health care boards and commissions.
During a 1978–79 sabbatical, Bonnyman and his wife, Claudia (who is a state court judge), served as Volunteers in Mission for the United Presbyterian Church, working for a human rights organization in the Middle East. During a 1994 sabbatical, they worked under the auspices of the American Volunteers in Democracy program, helping to staff a human rights organization that combats hate crimes and racial discrimination in Eastern Europe.
In 2007 the Southern Trial Lawyers Association honored Bonnyman with the War Horse Award. In 2003 the Nashville Tennessean named him Tennessean of the Year.