Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania
Corey Davis, JD, MSPH •
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Leo Beletsky, JD, MPH •
Health in Justice Action Lab
A new Perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine examines a recent decision by a Philadelphia judge to reject the argument that an overdose prevention site, called Safehouse, would violate the Controlled Substances Act.
The decision signals a move toward an approach to regulating drugs that minimizes both the harms of drugs and the harms caused by regulation itself – worthy goals all around, the authors write.
This draft memo, prepared by Angus Corbett, addresses the question of how local governments can enforce housing codes to enable low-income tenants to live in safe and healthy housing. It reviews the market for low-cost rental housing and provides an outline of the “dynamics” of this market. The memo identifies three models in use for enforcing housing codes: the “deterrence” model, the strategic code enforcement model and a meta-regulation model.
Public health leaders are called to develop more effective messages that appeal to a broader range of “moral foundations” and also to the new millennial generation who represent the future of the public health workforce. In this column, the authors turn the focus from the tools we can use to craft persuasive messages to the virtues that can make us worthy of being heeded.
This article introduces readers to policy surveillance as a method to create empirical legal datasets, using two examples from the field of housing law.
This article outlines 23 legal mechanisms, or levers, that may impact health equity in housing in the United States, and reviews the evidence base evaluating each lever.
The article introduces a model that divides the levers among five core domains intended to promote greater health equity in housing:
This five-part webinar series hosted in 2019 examines policy surveillance and empirical legal research methods and standards, issues in global and local policy surveillance, and challenges and opportunities for the use of policy surveillance in research and policymaking.
Scott Burris examines opportunity costs in public health law and the role evaluation and legal epidemiology should play in monitoring and evaluating the laws that impact Americans' health.
For public health, concerns about nuisance property ordinances are important, both because of the general importance of stable housing to personal and family health and because of the particularly severe consequences of eviction. Although other laws may protect the housing rights of domestic violence survivors, the fact that the main housing laws so rarely protect victims of domestic violence is concerning, purely on the level of legal doctrine and public policy.
This study uses policy surveillance to compare the prevalence and characteristics of facility laws governing abortions specifically targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws; office-based surgeries, procedures, sedation or anesthesia (office interventions) generally (OBS laws); and other procedures.
So far, it looks as if law has reduced the damage but not turned back the tide in the opioid epidemic. Given that most states now have adopted some version of Good Samaritan, naloxone access, and PDMP laws, where do lawmakers go next?
