As the United States marks one year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in more than 500,000 deaths so far and a historic economic recession, 50 top legal experts have convened to offer a new assessment of the U.S. policy response to the crisis in the COVID-19 Policy Playbook: Legal Recommendations for a Safer, More Equitable Future.
This report offers policy recommendations on 35 wide-ranging topics from 50 national experts, from pandemic preparedness and health care to conducting sound elections and adapting immigration policy. Designed to advise leaders at the federal, state and local level, the report presents a timely examination of policy challenges and opportunities in light of the pandemic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 legal map captures insurance coverage mandates of contraception in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia in effect from January 1, 2016 through December 31, 2021. It was produced by Elizabeth A. McCaman, JD, MPH, a senior attorney at the National Health Law Program.
The eviction crisis in the United States is a serious public health issue that affects millions of people each year. The eviction process is regulated by a patchwork of state and local laws and court rules that govern the judicial process, but little is known about the ways in which these laws affect the likelihood of evictions.
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