If you’ve been up to the third floor of Barrack Hall in the past year, you may have run into some of our staff … lawyers, a few social scientists and communicators, toiling away in Suite 300. If you haven’t stopped in to ask what they’re doing, I encourage you to do so, because it’s exciting, and in many ways, revolutionary.
Our work, essentially, supports the widespread adoption of scientific tools and methods for mapping and evaluating the impact of law on health.
In 2009, we began as the National Program Office for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research program under the Law School’s Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, to make the case for laws that improve health. We were asked by RWJF to build the field and identify methods for researching the impact of laws and policies on health and wellbeing. As we started, we realized that it’s difficult to evaluate the impact of laws and policies on health if you don’t know what the laws and policies are, what they say, and how they’ve changed over time.
We ultimately identified a process called policy surveillance — the systematic collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of laws and policies across jurisdictions or institutions, and over time.
We pioneered methods for this approach, combining traditional legal research methods with scientific methods and technology to make the process for identifying who has what laws, what they say and how they’ve changed over time, more efficient. (We’ve even made a short video that you can watch here that describes the process.)
The technology is one of the best parts. Through a technology transfer with Temple, we spun off a new company that develops software specifically to support this kind of work. Using this system (and anyone can), researching a legal topic from one year to the next now does not include a cumbersome search through Word files buried on a dusty computer hard-drive, or digging through paper files in a storage room. It’s all online, and can be updated quickly and efficiently.
Since 2009, this field, and the work we do here at Temple Law, has ballooned. Our website dedicated to this project, LawAtlas.org, is now one of the authoritative places for policy surveillance data and methods training. It includes more than 40 different datasets displayed as interactive maps that objectively outline the characteristics of laws in about 15 different major public health topic areas — from syringe exchange laws, to OSHA regulations, anti-bullying laws and laws regulating return-to-play and reporting requirements related to youth sports concussions, and everything in between.
Did we mention that everything on the site is available for free download?
The RWJF Public Health Law Research program ended in June, and the Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice is undergoing a re-organization. We are expanding on the work funded by RWJF, CDC, NIH and others, and changing our name to the Center for Public Health Law Research.
We hope you’ll consider using – and sharing – our resources, follow us on social media (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn), and stop by Barrack Suite 300 to chat and learn more about what we do!
