By Scott Burris, JD The National Football League has given the National Institutes of Health $30 million for research on traumatic brain injury. There is much we don’t know about the causes, effects, prevention and treatment of sports-related brain injury – but that doesn’t mean that we should put all our eggs into the basket…
By Scott Burris In a Perspective in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, Michelle Mello and Glenn Cohen, both professors at Harvard, write about the prospects for using the constitutional Taxing Power to adopt innovative laws to advance public health objectives. Cueing off the Supreme Court’s decision in the Affordable Care Act litigation, Mello…
By Wendy Parmet It’s easy to see the value of including scientists in public health law research teams; most public health lawyers lack the training to conduct rigorous empirical research. It may be harder to see the need for adding lawyers to the research team, but their presence is no less critical. Sometimes scientists have…
By Scott Burris The concept of “overcriminalization” is gaining traction across the political spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, which has a website devoted to the phenomenon, defines it as “the trend in America – and particularly in Congress – to use the criminal law to ‘solve’ every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use…
By Scott Burris Sometimes researchers can tell policy makers pretty confidently what public health law interventions really make a difference. The PHLR website has more than 50 Evidence Briefs that summarize the results of systematic reviews of the evidence on interventional public health laws conducted by the Cochrane and Campbell Collaboratives, and the Community Guide…
By Scott Burris, JD Law has been used to protect and promote public health from the early days of European colonization of North America. Quarantine statutes and orders are reported from the mid-17th century. The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, where our office is based, inspired the federal government’s first public health statute, authorizing…
