LAW 742 - Public Health Law

Course Type: Upper Level Elective
Credits: 3

Description: This course focuses exclusively on one domain of health law—public health law. The subject matter is “the body of law authorizing, facilitating and limiting collective actions taken to prevent and reduce the burden of disease and injury and promote the health of the population.” Professors Lawrence O. Gostin and Lindsay F. Wiley broadly define the scope of public health law as “the study of the legal powers and duties of the state to assure the conditions for people to be healthy (to identify, prevent and ameliorate risks to health in the population) and the limitations on the power of the state to constrain the autonomy, privacy, liberty, proprietary, or other legally protected interests of individuals for the common good.” Similarly, they identify a lofty goal for the discipline: “The prime objective of public health law is to pursue the highest possible level of physical and mental health in the population, consistent with the values of social justice.” Public health is “a political and social undertaking” that aims to improve population health through collective activity. As a political undertaking, public health includes government’s central role, grounded in its power, to protect the public’s health from imminent threat and to provide public goods that would not otherwise be available from individual action alone. As a social undertaking, public health includes many forms of social and community action to address complex social, behavioral and/or environmental conditions that affect health. Public health activity “increasingly involves overlapping networks of individuals and organizations, including governmental and private agencies, profit and not-for-profit stakeholders, professionals from many disciplines, and citizens, all working together over time to improve the population’s health and the living conditions in the community.” As a domain of public policy, this field encompasses a stunning range of policy problems, draws on the full array of biomedical, behavioral and social sciences, and has an increasingly global reach. This course will focus on the range of interventions and essential services provided by public health, the “tools” of public health. These include the collection and use of health data for public health purposes (“surveillance” in in the vocabulary of public health practitioners); immunization, using human papillomavirus vaccine and a measles outbreak as case studies; mandated treatment, using tuberculosis as a case study; screening and behavioral interventions, using HIV/AIDS as a case study; persuasion and social marketing, including media campaigns, using various communications designed to reduce obesity as vehicles for testing the ethical and legal constraints on “government speech” aiming to promote health; regulation of advertising and labeling, using tobacco as a case study; environmental health regulation, using fluoride, residential lead poisoning and firearm access as case studies; and product regulation, using ready-to-eat packaged foods, motor vehicle airbags and e-cigarettes as case studies; and environmental health regulation, using fluoride, residential lead poisoning and firearm access as case studies