“Legal epidemiology,” the scientific study of law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease in a population, is funded and conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but the level of work and its distribution across the agency has not been assessed.
This report summarizes the findings from a scan of the the EndNote library maintained for Science Clips (publications by CDC authors). The library was searched by CDC librarians for journal articles published by CDC staff from January 2011 to May 2015. A team at the Public Health Law Research program reviewed and coded the abstracts to produce data on key features of the articles. The Public Health Law Research program identified 225 articles in the realm of legal epidemiology, comprised of 158 scientific evaluations and 67 commentaries or other forms of non-empirical legal scholarship.