Public Health Law 101 and Introduction to Legal Epidemiology

Overview:

This is a 2.5-hour recording of a live workshop.

Public health law has important implications for protecting the public’s health. However, the need to protect the public’s health must be balanced with the rights of affected individuals. Accordingly, it is more important than ever for public health officials to understand the power and limits of their authority. Having an understanding of the constitutional power and limits of this authority equips public health practitioners and partners with the tools necessary to ensure their policies are constitutionally permissible and capable of withstanding legal challenge. Understanding the powers and limits of their authority is also central to intergovernmental collaboration. The legal concept of preemption, for example, has important implications for health care delivery and public health, but can be difficult to understand and challenging to navigate in practice. Legal research has also provided vital information on the rapidly changing legal landscape that can be correlated with data on health outcomes, system performance, and costs. State, tribal, local, and territorial health departments have expressed the need for capacity-building in surveilling and monitoring their own laws and policies. With the growing recognition that legal data can be used to guide public health practice comes the need for accurate translation, or dissemination, of legal epidemiology as a tool. This mini-course was developed to address these challenges.