Research Results

This five-part webinar series hosted in 2019 examines policy surveillance and empirical legal research methods and standards, issues in global and local policy surveillance, and challenges and opportunities for the use of policy surveillance in research and policymaking.

Scott Burris examines opportunity costs in public health law and the role evaluation and legal epidemiology should play in monitoring and evaluating the laws that impact Americans' health.

This study uses policy surveillance to compare the prevalence and characteristics of facility laws governing abortions specifically targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws; office-based surgeries, procedures, sedation or anesthesia (office interventions) generally (OBS laws); and other procedures.

So far, it looks as if law has reduced the damage but not turned back the tide in the opioid epidemic. Given that most states now have adopted some version of Good Samaritan, naloxone access, and PDMP laws, where do lawmakers go next?

Using data from LawAtlas and the High School Report Injury Online between the 2005-2006 and 2015-2016 academic years, the researchers examined the statistical association between the implementation of state laws addressing concussions and actual concussion rates in high school athletes reported by athletic trainers. The study focused on nine common high-school sports: boys’ football, basketball, soccer, baseball, and wrestling; and girls’ basketball, soccer, softball, and volleyball.

This study examined the consistency and variation in written high school policies addressing youth traumatic brain injuries (more commonly known as concussions) in relation to the three most common components of youth sports traumatic brain injury laws.

A pandemic due to a rapidly transmissible infectious agent has always been a major threat to humanity, and recent outbreaks of Ebola and Zika have heightened interest in ensuring that governments are prepared to respond to this threat. Governance – the assignment of authority and the specification of procedures – is a central pillar of effective pandemic management. Without sound rules in place, ad hoc measures risk being ineffective or unjust, failing to respect human rights and worsening the impact of an outbreak.

This study finds that foodborne illness rates decreased by 22 percent after implementation of the paid sick leave law in jurisdictions with laws more supportive of employees taking leave, but increased in jurisdictions with laws that are less supportive.

This study describes patient characteristics, clinical features, and EMS response to opioid overdoses in Seattle, comparing heroin and pharmaceutical opioid (PO) overdoses from six alternating months in 2011. While they are clinical similar, the study finds that heroin and pharmaceutical opioid overdoses are treated differently by responders.