This article, published in the American Journal of Public Health, highlights gaps in transparency around how legal data are collected and coded and outlines the plan for developing the Standards for Legal Epidemiology Reporting (STLER) with the EQUATOR Network. 

There has been significant improvement in policy evaluation methods, followed by greater openness to causal claims, but in one respect, the study of the health effects of laws and legal practices — now often referred to as “legal epidemiology” — appears to be problematic: transparent reporting of the specific methods used to create the legal variables representing the legal exposure. Transparency is a fundamental scientific value and crucial for peer review, replication, and credibility for research consumers.

To maintain our credibility in the supply chain of evidence-informed policy, the diverse multidisciplinary community of researchers studying the health effects of law must work together to course correct now. The development of a robust reporting standard is the first step. We encourage members of the research community to help us develop these standards — and then to spread them across our many fields and journals and to put them into routine practice.

Read the paper

Authors:

• Cason D. Schmit, JD

• Scott Burris, JD

• Safura Abdool Karim, LLM, PhD

• Benjamin A. Barsky, JD, PhD

• Sean Grant, DPhil

• Alina Schnake-Mahl, ScD, MPH

• Lauren Tonti, JD, MPH

• Megan D. Douglas, JD

• Kimberly M. Nelson, PhD, MPH 

• Amie J. Goodin, PhD, MPP

• Kristen Underhill, JD, DPhil

• Mathieu J. P. Poirier, PhD, MPH, CPH

• Jin Yung Bae JD, MPH

• Elizabeth Piekarz-Porter JD

• Regen Weber-Fares JD, MPH

• Susan Zells Ingber MSPP, AB

• Jamie F. Chriqui PhD, MHS