James S. Turner is a partner in the Washington, DC law firm of Swankin and Turner, formed in 1973. He is also Board Chair of Citizens for Health, the consumer voice of the natural health community; President of the National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy; and President of Voice for HOPE (Healers Of Planet Earth). 

In 1968, Mr. Turner came to Washington, DC to work with Ralph Nader. He wrote The Chemical Feast: The Nader Report on Food Protection at the FDA (Grossman, 1970), and co-authored Making Your Own Baby Food (Workman, 1974) and Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life (DaVinci Press, 2008). 

As an attorney, Mr. Turner represents consumer, environmental and public interest groups, as well as businesses and individuals, on a wide variety of regulatory and other legal matters concerning foods, drugs, health, the environment, and product safety. He has served as Special Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Food, Nutrition, and Health, and to the Senate Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Research. He has also been a policy consultant to major corporations in the food, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications industries, including Kraft Foods, The Quaker Oats Company, Hoffmann-LaRoche, and AT&T. 

Mr. Turner represented a consumer coalition that successfully opposed a Federal Trade Commission effort to ban the words “organic,” “natural,” and “health food” from commerce, and was lead attorney on a successful petition to the FDA to reclassify acupuncture needles from Class III to Class II medical devices, thereby permitting their legal importation and distribution. 

He is a 1969 graduate of The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and served as a gunnery officer in the United States Navy.​​

He has been working for the rights of vaccine choice, with a special focus on the state of California and their recent legal actions removing most of the exemption rights.

His primary care provider has been a homeopath for years.  Upon learning of homeopathic prophylaxis, his desire has quickly become to get this immunisation option legally recognized in the United States.