Author: Joshua Waimberg, JD, MBA

Graphic of a globe with interconnected bubbles with cartoons of various people and practitioners to exemplify World Health Day

A Decade of Public Health Legal Education

Law is the primary social tool used to influence behaviors and environments — for “generalizing or scaling up practices judged collectively beneficial, forestalling negative behavior, and setting powers, duties, and limitations on public and private entities.” As researchers, policymakers, advocates and others seek to better understand how and why legal interventions make a difference to the public’s health, public health legal education stands as a crucial component in the capacity building necessary for rigorous and rapid evaluation of these legal interventions that “treat” millions of people. That evaluation — called public health law research, or legal epidemiology research — supports evidence-based policy- and decision-making that can advance health, improve well-being, and increase equity not only in the United States, but around the world. For nearly 12 years, the Center for Public Health Law Research at the Beasley School of Law has been dedicated to that capacity building through our work developing research methods for legal epidemiology, like policy surveillance (which is the systematic, scientific tracking of laws of public health significance); funding research projects with …