UNDERSTANDING HOW LAW INFLUENCES ENVIRONMENTS AND BEHAVIOR

In "Mechanisms of Legal Effect: Criminological Theories," Wesley Jennings and Tom Mieczkowski provide researchers with key theories from criminology that explain the influence of criminal law on behavior. Public health law researchers investigating the effects of regulations and sanctions on health behavior can draw on these theories and the research methods and tools criminologists have devised to test them.

Social psychology plays an important role in explicating mechanisms of legal effect. From a social psychological perspective, laws and regulations can be classified according to the type of causal pathway by which behaviors are modified, for example, through changing attitudes, normative beliefs or self-efficacy concerning a specific behavior.

 

"Law and Society" is the term for scholarship using a variety of social science methods to study law and legal institutions. The unique contribution of this approach is its focus on meaning-making as a mechanism of legal effect. A foundational assumption is the need to focus on law in action rather than solely on law on the books.

Key law and society concepts, including legal consciousness, law as legality, organizational legalization and organizational politics elaborate how law operates in action through meaning making.

As public health and medical breakthroughs of the early 20th century controlled infectious diseases and expanded life expectancy, public health shifted its attention from infectious to chronic disease. This era of public health primarily focused on individual-level risk factors and intervention approaches. Most recently there has been a movement to re-emphasize the importance of fundamental determinants of health and disease, including economic, social and physical conditions.