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Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy

Document Type

Symposium Article

Abstract

Health in America is not looking good. Unique among countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the basic measure of national health—life expectancy—was declining even before COVID-19. Public health, both as a system of institutions and as a profession working to promote longer and healthier lives, is also struggling. The normal insularity of the field’s professional culture—including a lack of legal competency—helped undermine the response to COVID-19, which was dismal by any measure. At this difficult time, this Article considers three different ways public health lawyers can make a contribution to public health as a goal and as a government function. Public health lawyers today can work for public health, doing research, developing interventions, providing technical assistance, organizing and acting politically, and writing briefs, articles, and books. Lawyers can also help, perhaps paradoxically, by working against public health, pushing public health professionals and their agencies to overcome chronic problems including ongoing failure to truly integrate law into training and practice; insufficient investment in empirical research on the health effects of laws and legal practices, and a concomitant disregard of the importance of this kind of feedback to the effectiveness and accountability of public health agencies; and limited success in putting data and discussion on social determinants of health, health equity and anti-racism into effective practice. Finally, public health lawyers can work beyond the political and institutional confines of conventional public health to find new allies, legal targets, and strategies for promoting a fair, just (and thereby much healthier) society.

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