FRAMING PUBLIC HEALTH LAW RESEARCH

This commentary describes the emergence of legal epidemiology, its key methods and tools, and the challenges it faces going forward. 

This webinar, hosted on January 21, 2021, and organized by the UK Faculty of Public Health in collaboration with the European Public Health Association, introduces a global audience to the emerging approach of legal epidemiology, the scientific study and deployment of law and legal practices for public health.

The authors describe Five Essential Public Health Law Services and suggest investment in the people, methods and tools needed to move major policy initiatives from conception to widespread implementation. The model reflects a transdisciplinary approach integrating public health legal practice with law-related surveillance, evaluation and enforcement functions usually performed by public health practitioners.

Legal intervention to influence individual health behavior has increased dramatically since the 1960s. This paper describes the rise of law as a tool of public health, and the scientific research that has assessed and often guided it, with a focus on five major domains: traffic safety, gun violence, tobacco use, reproductive health and obesity. These topical stories illustrate both law’s effectiveness and limitations as a public health tool. They also establish its popularity by the most apt of metrics – the willingness of legislators to enact it.

This paper presents a three-step process for developing legal interventions as well as observations and suggestions for how to think about legal innovation within the broader campaign for evidenced-based policy.

This article traces the emergence of the policy surveillance over the past 50 years, shows its value to public health promotion and protection, and identifies major challenges ahead.

This resource describes an emerging model of public health law that unites the traditions of law and scientific evaluation.

For three decades, experts have been stressing the importance of law to the effective operation of public health systems.

Public health experts, legal scholars and policy makers are increasingly recognizing that laws can keep people safe and healthy; for example, by encouraging the use of seat belts and by keeping the environment safe from toxins. This growing recognition has led to the emergence of “public health law research,” a developing field aimed at studying the intended and unintended consequences of laws on public health as a way to support evidence-based policy making.