Health Law

This book represents a body of work performed by students from a diverse set of disciplines and a variety of universities. Each project was developed by the students to "break the cycle of social, economic and environmental health disparities." "Break the cycle" projects are designed to raise awareness among the students of the reality of environmental health disparities and its impact on the world around them.

The latest edition of Health Policy Developments describes how countries search for solutions that combine the state's role with private entrepreneurship. The book illustrates the many shapes that privatization can take in health care reform, ranging from financing models featuring co-insurance and subsidies for private insurance policies to new types of hospital ownership and new contractual relationships, such as public concessions to private providers. The book also looks at the ways hospitals are working to reduce medical errors, which are often fatal. For example, more people die every year from medical errors than from traffic accidents or breast cancer. To optimize patient safety, several countries use sophisticated IT systems, nonpunitive reporting measures for error identification and prevention (making them part of quality management), and greater transparency.

Law in Public Health Practice provides a thorough review of the legal basis and authorities for the core elements of public health practice and solid discussions of existing and emerging high-priority areas where law and public health intersect. Each chapter is authored jointly by experts in law and public health. Chapters address such topics as the structure of law in US public health systems and practice, the role of the judiciary in public health, and law in chronic disease prevention and control. The book begins with a section on the legal basis for public health practice, including foundations and structure of the law, discussions of the judiciary, ethics and practice of public health, and criminal law and international considerations. The second section focuses on core public health applications and the law, and includes chapters on legal counsel for public health practitioners, legal authorities for interventions in public health emergencies, and considerations for special populations. The third section discusses the law in controlling and preventing diseases, injuries, and disabilities.

Over the last quarter century, much of the focus of federal regulatory policy in the areas of health, safety, and the environment has been gradually redirected away from protecting Americans against various harms and toward protecting corporate interests from the plain meaning of protective statues. This book delivers precisely what its title promises, a re-imaging of federal policy in these areas, with particular focus on the regulation and process. It identifies the failings of the current approach to regulation and process innovative, straightforward, and practical solutions for the 21st century. The book is a collaboration among the Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Regulation.

Law plays a crucial role in protecting the health of populations. Whether the public health threat is bioterrorism, pandemic influenza, obesity, or lung cancer, law is an essential tool for addressing the problem. Yet for many decades, courts and lawyers have frequently overlooked law's critical importance to public health. Populations, Public Health, and the Law seeks to remedy that omission. The book demonstrates why public health protection is a vital objective for the law and presents a new population-based approach to legal analysis that can help law achieve its public health mission while remaining true to its own core values. By looking at a diverse range of topics, including food safety, death and dying, and pandemic preparedness, Wendy E. Parmet shows how a population-based legal analysis that recalls the importance of populations and uses the tools of public health can enhance legal decision making while protecting both public health and the rights and liberties of individuals and their communities.

Lawrence O. Gostin and Lindsay F. Wiley's Public Health Law analyzes major health threats of our time such as chronic diseases, emerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, bioterrorism, natural disasters, opioid overdose, and gun violence. The authors draw on constitutional law, administrative law, local government law, and tort law to develop their conception of law as a tool for protecting the public's health. The book creates an intellectual framework for modern public health law and supports that framework with illustrations of the scientific, political, and ethical issues involved. In proposing solutions for the future of the public's health, Gostin and Wiley's essential study provides a blueprint for public and political debates to come.

Public Health Law in a Nutshell provides a fascinating, informative, and concise assessment of the critical role of law in American society to protect the community's health. Updated through 2015 in this ever-developing field, the Nutshell lays out definitive legal issues underlying core public health powers to prevent and control communicable and chronic conditions like influenza, obesity, cancer, and heart disease. The text also explores legal routes to address sources of other public health threats, including tobacco and alcohol use, guns, vehicles, and defective products. Additional chapters focused on information surveillance, commercial speech regulation, the built environment, and emergency preparedness provide concise clear assessments of difficult law and policy trade-offs. Understanding the field of public health law encompasses its constitutional sources and limits as well as historic and modern attempts to regulate in the interests of the community's health and safety. This Nutshell specifically explains and addresses these issues while also providing a modern framework supporting the role of law in this pivotal area of society. It is a "must read" for any legal or public health practitioner in the field, law- and policy-makers working to protect the public's health, as well as students in schools of law, public health, or medicine assessing these issues in prior or current coursework.

This book serves as a common framework to facilitate communications and cooperation between health professionals and their legal advisors. Addressed primarily to health professionals, this book is invaluable for transforming the black letter of the law on the statute books into real-life protection of the public's health. Although public health law applies to both private organizations and individuals, its principal impact is on governmental agencies, particularly federal agencies and state and local health departments working to protect "population health." Substantial treatment is given to environmental health law. It also provides greatly enriched material on legal aspects of personal health services, including right of privacy, recent abortion and "right to die" cases, and an expanded discussion of law and policy governing HIV/AIDS. There is also an in-depth analysis of the new HIPPA Privacy Rule providing the first national standards for certain individually identifiable health data. A new chapter also covers the need for Public International Concern - a sweeping review of examples of the principal international agencies, treaties, legal instruments and documents on international public health policies including SARS, bioterrorism, ozone depletion, and global warming.

In bioethics, discussions of justice have tended to focus on questions of fairness in access to health care: is there a right to medical treatment, and how should priorities be set when medical resources are scarce. But health care is only one of many factors that determine the extent to which people live healthy lives, and fairness is not the only consideration in determining whether a health policy is just. In this book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden develop a unique theory of social justice that, while developed for the specific contexts of public health and health policy, applies equally well to other realms of social policy including education and economic development. They place a six dimensional theory of well-being at the heart of their theory of justice. They then explore the implications of this theory for public health, the medical market place, and the setting of priorities in health policy. In the process, they arrive at arresting conclusion about the moral foundations of public health, childhood, the relevance of social groups to questions of justice, and the proper role for economic analysis in social policy. The audience for the book is scholars and students of bioethics and moral and political philosophy, as well as anyone interested in public health and health policy.

Biosecurity comprehensively analyzes the dramatic transformations that are reshaping how the international community addresses biological weapons and infectious diseases. Gostin and Fidler argue that the arms control approach in the Biological Weapons Convention no longer dominates. Other strategies have emerged to challenge the arms control approach, and the book identifies four important policy trends--the criminalization of biological weapons, regulation of the biological sciences, management of the biodefense imperative, and preparation for biological weapons attack. The book also explores the challenges to public health resulting from new security threats. The authors look at the linkages between security and public health policy, both at the national and international level. For instance, Gostin and Fidler scrutinize the difficulty of developing policies that improve defenses against both biological weapons and the threat of infectious diseases from new viral strains. The new worlds of biological weapons and public health governance raise the importance of crafting policy responses informed by the rule of law.

Globalization has immersed all of humanity in a single germ pool. There are no health sanctuaries in a globalizing world. In Global Health Governance, Obijiofor Aginam explores the relevance of international law in contemporary public health diplomacy. He focuses on the concept of mutual vulnerability to explore the globalization of disease, in what is paradoxically a global village and a divided world. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, Global Health Governance offers a holistic approach to global health governance involving a multiplicity of actors: nation-states, international organizations, civil society organizations, and private actors. International law--with its bold claims to universal protection of human rights and human dignity--is an indispensable governance tool for the reconstruction of damaged public health trust in the relations of nations and peoples.

In this book, Lawrence Gostin drives home the need for effective global governance for health and offers a blueprint for reform, based on the principle that the opportunity to live a healthy life is a basic human right. Gostin shows how critical it is for institutions and international agreements to focus not only on illness but also on the essential conditions that enable people to stay healthy throughout their lifespan: nutrition, clean water, mosquito control, and tobacco reduction. Policies that shape agriculture, trade, and the environment have long-term impacts on health, and Gostin proposes major reforms of global health institutions and governments to ensure better coordination, more transparency, and accountability. He illustrates the power of global health law with case studies on AIDS, influenza, tobacco, and health worker migration.

This research review highlights and discusses some of the most significant contributions to the study of global health law. Global health law is a recent field of research in its own right and encompasses the relatively narrow core of international rules.

Current Legal Issues is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. Law and Global Health offers an insight into the scholarship examining the relationship between global health and the law. Covering a wide range of areas from all over the world, articles in the volume look at areas of human rights, vulnerable populations, ethical issues, legal responses and governance.

Through a comparative global study of countries from all continents representing a diversity of health, legal, political, and economic systems, this book explores the role of health rights in advancing greater equality through access to health care. Does health care promote equality, or does it in fact advance the opposite result? Does inserting the idea of 'the right to health' into health systems allow the reinsertion of public values into systems that are undergoing privatization? Or does it allow for private claims to be re-articulated as 'rights', in a way that actually reinforces inequality? This volume includes studies from countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, The Netherlands, China, and Nigeria, among many others, and authors with expertise in the legal and health systems of their countries, making this a seminal study that allows readers to see the differing role of rights in various health systems.

Available on Westlaw. The American Journal of Public Health is the official journal of the American Public Health Association. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles in public health research, policy, practice and education.

The Global Health and Human Rights Database is a free online database of law from around the world relating to health and human rights. Developed by Lawyers Collective and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, in collaboration with a worldwide network of civil society partners, the database offers an interactive, searchable, and fully indexed website of case law, national constitutions and international instruments.

Journal of Public Health Management and Practice publishes articles which focus on evidence based public health practice and research. The journal is a bi-monthly peer-reviewed publication guided by a multidisciplinary editorial board of administrators, practitioners and scientists. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice publishes in a wide range of population health topics including research to practice; emergency preparedness; bioterrorism; infectious disease surveillance; environmental health; community health assessment, chronic disease prevention and health promotion, and academic-practice linkages. Recognized as the leading practice based public health journal, the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice has recently published focus issues defining the public health workforce, performance management and bridging the research to practice gap.

Prepared by the Library of Congress, this report contains discussions of the regulations addressing health emergencies in 25 jurisdictions, including countries from six continents, the European Union, and the World Health Organization. All surveys included in this report review government structures tasked with delivering public health protection, relevant legislative frameworks for addressing health emergencies, and the powers of government institutions in times of health crises and their ability to mitigate the consequences of such crises. Analyses of the regulation of such issues as disease surveillance and notification systems are also provided.

Available on Westlaw. The Nation's Health is the official newspaper of the American Public Health Association. It focuses on public health issues at the federal, state and local level, delivering the latest news to public health professionals, legislators and the public.

Available on Lexis Advance. Provides access to Public Health & Welfare Law cases, statutes and legislation, adminstrative materials, forms, briefs, pleadings, and motions, jury instructions, verdicts and settlements, expert witness analysis, dockets, directories, Public Health & Welfare Law News, and scientific information.