The COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted eviction as a public health crisis and exacerbated the problem. In a new article published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, housing law experts at the Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research call for a realignment in how we think about and approach the housing crisis — and eviction in particular — in America.
This research, produced by the International and Comparative Law Research Center with expertise from staff from the Center for Public Health Law Research, examines the legal framework applicable to emergencies in general and the current pandemic at the international, regional (EAEU, EU), and national levels (China, France, Germany, Italy, the Russian Federation and its subjects, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States). It includes both the preexisting regulation and its evolution caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This international legal research report, produced by the International and Comparative Law Research Center and including experts from the Center for Public Health Law Research, seeks to document effective mechanisms for legal regulation of the development and production of vaccines and the vaccination process at the universal, regional, and national levels.
The Identifying Data for the Empirical Assessment of Law (IDEAL) method, developed by a team of academics, lawyers, reproductive health experts and law students, follows three steps to support the development of evidence-based guidelines and practice related to abortion law. The process identifies social science and epidemiological evidence that does not explicitly address the law, but can nonetheless enhance the understanding of legal effects and identify research gaps and priority research topics.
This essay in The Regulatory Review examines the legacy of the US Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Author Scott Burris contends that the vision set by Jacobson — one of coexistence and cooperation in a democratic commonwealth — is in jeopardy as courts in recent COVID-19 constitutional cases have unveiled a new view based less on the social contract than on a strong form of libertarianism.
As long as the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone remain in place, it creates an unnecessary barrier to access safe medication for abortion and miscarriage care. This article discusses why it’s critical to permanently remove the REMS to reduce the disproportionate harms of abortion restrictions on communities of color, and advance equity in and access to timely and essential reproductive health care.
Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania
Alexander Wagenaar, PhD •
Emory University
In this commentary for the New England Journal of Medicine, Scott Burris, Evan Anderson, and Alexander Wagenaar draw attention to the chronic underfunding and neglect of legal epidemiology, which is essential to bolstering the use of law and policy as an intervention to improve health. The authors call for the scale-up of the infrastructure for at least three kinds of research: study of the mechanisms, effects, side effects and implementation of laws designed to influence health, such as COVID control measures; research on how the legal infrastructure of the U.S.
In this commentary for the American Journal of Public Health, Scott Burris calls on the public health community to support the repeal of Stand Your Ground laws, and to probe more deeply into why the United States and its citizens feels the need for these laws in the first place.
