By Scott Burris
As we look toward National Public Health Week amid two long years of a pandemic, reflection for us at the Center for Public Health Law Research has focused on how we move forward in a mostly broken public health system. We see public health law as a central component of a strong future for public health, where transdisciplinary partnership leads the way.
By Scott Burris and Wendy E. Parmet
As the United States attempts to mitigate COVID-19 through social distancing, quarantines and isolation measures, we enter uncharted territory, and face pressing social, epidemiological, and legal questions.
Although the law is not fully settled, extreme measures that shutter businesses and limit social interactions outside of the home are likely constitutional if and when they are reasonably necessary, based on scientific evidence and knowledge, and are the least restrictive means available to stop a significant risk to the public. But adherence to those principles is not the only constitutional issue to consider during this pandemic.
For more than a decade, a variety of scholars and practitioners in public health, policing and the broader domain of security have been stoking a conversation about the links between their disciplines and the need to do a better job integrating the disciplines and practices.
This week, The Lancet published a special series on Security and Health. A global set of authors, myself included, make the case that military and police forces should be recognized as key players, rather than intruders, in public health, and therefore we need these relationships to be backed by investment in partnerships and reform. Take a look. You may even be inspired to put the next global Law Enforcement and Public Health Conference on your agenda, set for Edinburgh in October.
By Scott Burris
Glenn and Mark have done their bit for benchmarking our field with another round of health law professor rankings. It is a largely thankless task, so thank you professors. Last year, I responded to their list with the observation that any count based on law review publication alone was problematic in assessing the contributions of those in our field whose scholarship is primarily empirical or aimed at the health world. I offered a suggestive “top scholars list” based on Google Scholar profiles. Using Google Scholar, which captures articles in all fields, plus books and gray literature, brought a number of different names into the top 20. Since Google Scholar depends on individuals to create and clean their profiles, my list missed a lot of top scholars without profiles (I am talking about you, Michelle Mello and George Annas, etc. etc.), but it was enough to suggest that some very productive and much-cited scholars were missed in the Hall-Cohen list.
Recently, people in Vermont have been talking about launching a Safe Injection Facility (SIF) to address drug harms arising with the opioid epidemic. With more deaths than ever, trying new approaches make sense — especially “new” approaches like SIFs that have two decades of solid international evidence of efficacy behind them. Several cities are actively considering the same intervention.
One of the biggest barriers is uncertainty about how federal drug control authorities will react. Although there are reasonable arguments that SIFs for public health do not violate the Controlled Substances Act, and the national opioid task force has broadly called for extraordinary action, there has been no explicit support from the Trump administration and no effort to carve out space in the law from Congress. Read More
Paul Erwin, Associate Editor of the American Journal of Public Health, recently wrote about the establishment of a Sentinel Practitioner Surveillance System for Policy Change Impact, or what might be called “sentinel policy surveillance.” The network of twelve diverse health officers will be trying to identify and share instances of harmful impact from Trump administration policies.
Erwin is suitably circumspect about what such a network can do. It is, he writes, no replacement of research, and, indeed, may be reporting perceived or feared effects as often as real ones. I found the idea intriguing to ruminate on, though. What follows are some scattered thoughts about the concept. I hope readers will add theirs. Mostly I am interested in how the practice fits with general policy surveillance and public health law research. Read More
Glenn and Mark recently published a list of most-cited health law scholars, using the methods generally used for these studies in legal academia. Like any academic who steadfastly denigrates the importance of lists, I naturally checked right away to see where I ranked, which was somewhere so far down the list that only an outbeak of smallpox at the AALS meeting could ever get me into the top twenty. Since I was still completely uninterested in this whole ranking issue, my next move was to look at the methods. And this is where I did have a thought worth sharing.
The source of the data is the JRL library on Westlaw, which I believe primarily covers law reviews and other legal publications. How often one is cited in law reviews is certainly a good measure of impact within legal scholarsip, but it does not capture (or support) health law as an interdisciplinary field. Indeed, I think it is arguable that for many of us, our most important impact will be on research and scholarship in other fields. Does our top-twenty list look different if we draw on a broader database of citations?
I can’t tell you. That would be a lot of work. But there is a way to do it “collectively.” Google tracks citations that appear anywhere in the googleverse and reports them in Google Scholar — if you create a profile. Most of the people in the top 20 in the Hall-Cohen top 20 do not have Google Scholar Profiles, but a few do and the results suggest we might see some differences in impact ranking if we went beyond law reviews:
| Name | Hall/Cohen cites (rank) | Google cites (rank) since 2012 |
| Larry Gostin | 510 (1) | 7150 (1) |
| I. Glenn Cohen | 320 (4) | 1143 (3) |
| Frank Paquale | 300 (6) | 1081 (4) |
| Lars Noah | 280 (9) | 586 (5) |
| David Studdert | 190 (19) | 7129 (2) |
Everyone gets many more cites from Google than Westlaw, which reflects some methodological differences but also shows a lot of extra-legal impact. Larry Gostin is still on top, by quite a distance, but David Studdert — at the bottom of the law review top 20 — comes near to catching him. (I may as well admit that the Google ranking puts yours truly well above Cohen but nowhere near Studdent and Gostin.)
Why does this matter? The obvious point is the one I have already made: health law scholars should be aiming to make a difference in health policy, and that is not measured by law review citations alone. For us to thrive as a field, we need more than ever to be engaged with non-lawyers, as my colleagues and I argue for public health law here. Recognizing non-legal citations is also, in my experience, extremely important for supporting young scholars. If all we recognize and seem to value are law review citations, then junior scholars will only write law review articles. That is not how we build a field of engaged, cross-disciplinary scholars and researchers. I encourage junior scholars to create Google Scholar profiles and I use them when I am doing promotion and tenure reviews in this list-mad age.
One last point: Google Scholar profiles take about two minutes to create and a very minimal effort to curate (if you care to, you need to eliminate some dupes and misatributions). Whether you like rankings or transdisciplinary impact, you can help the field at minimal cost by signing up.
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Valerie Braithwaite’s chapter in the ANU’s Press’s new Regulatory Theory: Foundations and Applications provides a general introduction to looking at regulation through a social lens. If regulation is so great, she asks, why do so many people approach it with fear and loathing?
I won’t rehearse her argument here, but instead skip to some key points about how we who appreciate the social good provided by regulation can best make that case. One of ten suggestions she concludes with was particularly resonant to me: “Engage with dissent on moral grounds. Is it right morally to steer the flow of events in the way proposed?”
Peter Drahos and a roster of the minds that have made RegNet at the Australian National University the hub of regulatory research and theory have put (it seems) all they know into a new, FREE ebook, Regulatory Theory: Foundations and Applications. It is a comprehensive account of the field, written to serve both as a reference for the essentials and a text book for classes in regulation and governance. It even has a chapter on regulatory research methods in public health by this correspondent.
I am hoping to conduct a serial book review over the next couple of weeks. Here goes:
The first chapter is an introduction to the field by Drahos and Martin Krygier. It usefully orients the reader to the breadth of the field, a breadth that reflects the spread of regulatory activity beyond the state and across networks. Attention to those two phenomena, indeed, is properly presented as the foundation of the field. There is a bit of intellectual history, highlighting the sigificance of Ayres and Braithwaite’s Responsive Regulation, and the emergence of RegNet as an intellectual gathering place. (I saw that first hand, and had a little experience of RegNet collegiality, when I spent a semester there and ended up writing an article on Nodal Governance with Drahos and Clifford Shearing — still my most downloaded paper.) Read More
This week was all about fair housing. Particularly, the Affirmatively Further Fair Housing rule and recent attempts to dismantle it. Here’s the round-up for last week, January 29 – February 5, 2017:
We’ve talked a little about fair housing before. In case you missed it, we interviewed Christopher Bonastia about his book, “Knocking at the Door” back in November.
Did we miss any big housing, law and equity stories this week? Let us know!