As we close out our 15th year as a research center, we are so grateful to our team and for the support and collaboration from our funders and partners. This year saw so many major milestones: a new cooperative agreement with CDC, the launch of an improved MonQcle software and LawAtlas.org, and five new staff members, three legal interns, and three practicum students welcomed to our team.
We break down our year month-by-month below, but here are some highlights:
- 150+ legal datasets published to date
- 6 active NIH R01 awards
- 2 active five-year Cooperative Agreements from CDC
- 69 non-credit certificates in legal epidemiology awarded since 2022 launch
- 500+ citations of CPHLR legal data in scholarship to date
- 25+ active health law-related research projects focused on many of the most pressing issues in health law, including drug policy, reproductive rights, public health authority and preemption.
In January we spent a lot of time talking about drug policy and harm reduction, sharing six opportunities for law to support harm reduction on our blog, and publishing two datasets -- Incarceration Effects on Medicaid Status and Drug Decriminalization Laws. This work was all funded by the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts, supplementing our master list of 84 opportunities for a whole-of-government response to drug policy published last November.
February brought more drug policy work: we published the Buprenorphine Prescribing Requirements and Limitations dataset and eight opportunities to use law to address the social determinants of health, and hosted a webinar to talk about drug policy datasets. We also published new data that captures details of the state debt collection lawsuit process as of January 2023. This work, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, offers a baseline to help us better understand laws that vary widely and offer few protections for consumers. We traveled to the HEAL Investigators meeting in Bethesda. We also celebrated Love Data Week and had some fun sharing our love for legal epi and each other with our Legal Epi Valentines!
Lead Law and Policy Analyst Katie Moran-McCabe joined colleagues from the National Consumer Law Center and the National Center for Access to Justice on a webinar in mid-March to talk about state debt collection policies. We ramped up our planning for the 47th Health Law Professors Conference. And we marked the 2024 Trans Day of Visibility on March 31 by sharing resources from our library that focus on trans rights.
April brought celebrations for National Public Health Week and presented a sneak peak of the New LawAtlas.org in a webinar. Director Scott Burris outlined how to find and assess quality legal data for evaluation. The 2024 US News and World Report rankings were released: Temple Law was ranked 15th in the Health Law category!
In May we gleefully introduced the world to the newly redesigned LawAtlas.org, featuring so many great new tools and visualizations. We’re still riding the high of the new maps and overlapping dataset tool. We welcomed Program Manager, Jayne Guare, to the team. The Jeopardy fans among us were thrilled to see this answer: What is Temple University?
We hosted the 47th ASLME Health Law Professors Conference from June 5-7, bringing more than 250 health law teachers and practitioners to North Broad Street and our home in the Beasley School of Law. It was three fantastic days featuring nearly 50 concurrent sessions, two timely plenaries and tons of great conversations, networking and learning. We hosted a webinar offering best practices and examples of how to code case law in scientific legal mapping datasets, and we traveled to Pittsburgh for the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) 2024 Annual Conference.
After we all napped like Ripp Van Winkle after the Health Law Professors Conference, some of our team traveled to Detroit in July to present research on public health authority, drug policy, and legal epidemiology training at NACCHO360. Scott Burris spoke to USA Today about mask-wearing during protests. We learned how CPHLR Research Fellow and assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Juan Hincapie-Castillo successfully brought legal epi to UNC-Chapel Hill.
Our annual Policy Surveillance Institute kicked off August with registrants from the United States and Canada. We welcomed our new communications coordinator, Hope Nelson, and our newest law and policy analyst, Nadiri Ali. We worked with our colleagues at the Network for Public Health Law to publish their data on racial equity laws. Our team updated the dataset we created on debt collection law suit processes so it now includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, from January 1, 2023, through December 1, 2023. We convened a conversation about how to teach public health law during a time of judicial advocacy. We were honored with a new four-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to continue our work, and to be chosen for a five-year CDC Cooperative Agreement to strengthen public health impact, systems and services.
In September, we were awarded a new grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with Boston Children’s Hospital, Brown University School of Public Health, and Vital Village Networks to expand and extend a database of U.S. state laws pertinent to structural racism and racial justice. We were also awarded supplemental funding from CDC for three projects that will support researchers from CPHLR to provide technical assistance related to health equity and the social determinants of health to public health departments. It will also support topically specific legal epidemiology projects focused on statutory and regulatory policy related to HIV and efforts to increase evidence-based decision-making about policies that support the health of children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The latter project builds upon previous work tracking laws governing access to ADHD medication prescriptions. We explored the legal approaches to address rising temperatures on our blog, and some of our team traveled to St. Louis for the IAPHS Conference. We also published an update to data that’s tracking laws to guide the use of opioid litigation proceeds. And we welcomed Sabrina Zimmerman as a law and policy analyst to our team.
October brought another new law and policy analyst, Alex Willhouse, who’s rejoining us after having been a long-term intern. Scott Burris spoke in Vienna, Austria, at the Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine at the Central European University. Our team traveled to Minnesota for the 2024 APHA Annual Meeting where they presented on opioid harm reduction, reproductive rights, and abortion law post-Dobbs, emergency law for disaster response, environmental health strategies, and strengthening public health authority through legislative reforms and legal mapping.
In November we hosted a webinar that introduced and described three datasets that capture details of enacted legislation, state constitutions, and policies related to structural racism and racial equity in the United States. We closed out our funding from the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts and began work on an R01 project with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to build a data dashboard of state policies on sexual and reproductive health.
We finished the year in December with a flurry of new and updated legal data: CityHealth launched its 2024 assessment. We published an update to the State Preemption Laws dataset, adding a new domain on election policies, and our Drug Induced Homicide Dataset.
We’re looking forward to 2025 and all the data and research it will bring! Happy New Year!