Legal epidemiology is the scientific study of law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease and injury in a population.
Law sets standards of behavior and establishes the foundations for the environments where we live, learn, work, and play — beneficially and detrimentally. Legal epidemiology provides the infrastructure and scientific evidence for understanding how laws and policies work, and whether they are having the effects intended.
Legal epidemiology measures the nature and distribution of laws across jurisdictions and over time. It evaluates the implementation and impact of legal interventions on public health, and the health effects of non-health laws. It analyzes the implementation and impact of laws defining health department powers and duties. And it enables and supports the rapid diffusion of healthier laws and policies.
People working in legal epidemiology represent a diverse group of professions, disciplines, and motivations. They are lawyers, economists, criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, epidemiologists, as well as advocates, policymakers and legislators, doctors and medical practitioners, public health agencies, and so many others. They often approach the process of understanding the role and affects of laws and policies through their own lens, but the unifying goal among this vast field is to bring to bear the best of the scientific method and the best understanding of how law works to figure out how laws and legal practices influence public health so the best, most informed decisions can be made for policymaking.
Read more about the origins, methods and theories behind legal epidemiology
Before we can evaluate or analyze the implementation and impact of laws and policies, we must first identify where those laws occur, what they say, and examine how they have changed over time. We need data that capture the nuances and complexities of the text of those laws or policies from across jurisdictions, and over time.
Creating legal data for use in research requires a systematic process where researchers identify what features of laws they’d like to collect, find the legal texts where those features are codified, then identify the locations of those features within the texts, and then code those features to create the data by identifying and tracking similarities or differences among the texts.
We, and researchers around the world, create those data using scientific legal mapping methods like policy surveillance — the systematic, scientific collection and analysis of laws of public health significance. Policy surveillance creates reliable data for evaluation; creates transparent, accessible and non-partisan information about the law; tracks change over time and measures progress; diffuses innovative policy ideas; and supports workforce capacity building in public health practice. Read more about policy surveillance.
At the Center for Public Health Law Research, we do legal epidemiology, we teach legal epidemiology methods, and we promote the field and advance the cause of healthy public policy. We also work to disseminate the results of legal epidemiology research, because merely doing the research and putting it on a shelf makes no difference to public policy and to the health of the population. We work with our partners, collaborators, and funders to make sure that when we learn something important about the law, it gets out into the public debate. Learn more about our work.
