The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #41602

Wendy E. Parmet¹, Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA², Richard A. Daynard, JD, PhD¹, James N. Hyde, MA, SM², and Ben Kelley³. (1) School of Law, Northeastern University, 400 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, 617 373 2019, w.parmet@neu.edu, (2) Department of Family Medicine & Community Health, Tufts University School of Medicine, 136 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02111, (3) Public Health Advocacy Institute, 102 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115

Public health, a field that focuses upon the health of populations, confronting many issues important to law students and lawyers, is also a discipline that relies upon its own values, methodologies, and perspectives to analyze the world. Most importantly, the discipline of public health employs the science of epidemiology2 to study and explain phenomena in and affecting populations. We rely on the law to help protect people; the discipline of public health guides efforts to protect people from dangerous exposures in living and working environments. Most law schools offer courses on health law, but very few offer a course in public health law, examining the role law plays in keeping a population healthy. But more importantly, no law school routinely integrates the perspectives, values, and insights of public health as a discipline into the core of the curriculum. The Public Health Literacy Project, a joint endeavor of the Public Health Advocacy Institute and our faculties of law and public health, has started to remedy the problem by developing and disseminating teaching materials that will enable law school professors to introduce issues and concepts of public health into core law school courses. Undertaken in the belief that law professors will be more amenable to teaching about public health if there are easily accessible, well-developed materials that complement the cases already in the curriculum, the Project is creating such materials and will make them available to law school professors around the country.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the distinction between teaching law about public health and teaching public health as applied to law. Be able to contribute to this project.

Keywords: Public Health Advocacy, Regulations

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: Public Health Advocacy Institute, a non-profit joint venture of the law faculty at Northeastern and the public health faculty at Tufts.
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.