By Scott Burris In the last few decades, there has been a broad effort to strengthen the use of evidence-based law as a tool for the promotion of population health. There are two major fronts in the campaign, each essential, and both largely successful, though much work also remains. One aims to increase the quantity…
By Jeffrey Swanson, PhD Effective salespeople often practice something called an “elevator speech,”—a clear, persuasive pitch for their product that’s so succinct they can deliver it on the ride between the lobby and the mezzanine. Recently I found myself giving exactly such an impromptu presentation, literally on an elevator in a conference hotel in Atlanta,…
By Scott Burris Laura Brennan, Ross Brownson and Tracey Orleans have come out with an important paper reviewing the evidence on policy and environmental strategies for reducing childhood obesity. Twenty-four strategies and 2000 published and gray literature documents are covered. This is a menu of more-or-less evidence backed ideas for intervention. Sam Harper and colleagues…
By Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research This week, PHLR launched its SciVal Experts PHLR Community website. The core of the site is publications and other information for 300 leading public health law researchers doing empirical evaluations of the impact of laws and legal practices on health. The SciVal system allows visitors to…
By Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research The National Program Office (NPO) for Public Health Law Research (PHLR), a nationally recognized program sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the evaluation of the health impact of laws and legal practices, seeks a postdoctoral fellow who will provide quantitative analytical support to the PHLR…
By Scott Burris Working with Corey Davis of the Network for Public Health Law, PHLR has completed and posted updated longitudinal datasets of state laws authorizing naloxone distribution and creating “Good Samaritan” immunity for callers reporting a drug overdose to 911. Take a look at www.lawatlas.org. On the theory that an image beats a few…
By Scott Burris This is the last in a series summarizing a panel from the George collaborative of law professors at last week’s APHA meeting. My talk had a smiley icon for a title and a rant for a structure. I wanted to engage the audience with two very general ideas: that public health legal…
By Scott Burris One of the themes of what we might call Georgian Legal Scholarship has been the neglect of public health as a core object of government. This is a theme Wendy Parmet set out at length in Populations, Public Health and the Law, and that Renee Landers took up at APHA. Landers’ timely…
By Scott Burris (Second in a series of posts on the George Project session at APHA last week.) Lindsay Wiley, who has been writing some interesting stuff lately about the democratic foundations of public health, used her talk to discuss Building and Honoring Coalitions in Controversial Times. Part of the George discussion has been directed to…
By Scott Burris The “George Project” is a loose collaborative of law professors working to promote the fair and effective use of law for public health. It has been described here. Last week, four George participants formed a panel to report on their intellectual adventures in the sometimes dicey world of public health law. This…
