Stay-at-home orders, curfews, and mandatory quarantine have brought public health law to the public’s attention during the Covid-19 pandemic.
While public health law might be new to some, there is an entire academic discipline devoted to it, with a host of researchers and practitioners based in law schools (including dedicated health law and public health law centres), research institutes, non-profits, and health departments around the world. Public health law experts also work for global organisations such as the World Health Organisation. This is a short explainer on the discipline of public health law for anyone coming to it for the first time.
Public health law is distinct from health law, which is concerned with the law’s role in areas such as the provision of healthcare, the regulation of healthcare professionals and new medical technologies, medical negligence, and health information privacy.
The scope of public health law is much broader. Based on Lawrence Gostin’s widely cited definition, it is:
…the study of the legal powers and duties of the state to ensure the conditions for people to be healthy… and the limitations on the power of the state to constrain the autonomy, privacy, liberty, proprietary, or other legally protected interests of individuals for protection or promotion of community health.
A key focus is dedicated public health laws and their provisions on infectious disease control. These laws create the infrastructure for public health services and disease surveillance and reporting, but they also grant officials extensive powers to order the testing, treatment, vaccination, isolation, and quarantine of individuals with an infectious disease. These powers were rarely used in many countries (and may even have seemed archaic), until the Covid-19 global pandemic broke out. This is perhaps the first time that many people understood the coercive nature of public health law and saw these laws operating in practice.
There is now an extensive body of public health law research on national legal responses to Covid-19, as well on the international dimensions of the pandemic response, such as the WHO’s use of the International Health Regulations to declare Covid-19 a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
Official powers on infectious disease control illustrate some of the fundamental tensions at the heart of public health law. These include the tension between protecting individual rights and freedoms and promoting collective goods. Another is between achieving public health goals and achieving other social and economic objectives. Management of Covid-19 demonstrates this, with measures such as quarantine (which limits freedom of movement and other individual rights) being used extensively in the name of public health. Stay-at-home orders also limited the spread of Covid-19 but came at the expense of people’s ability to work, and at the expense of national economic functioning.
Some might think that public health lawyers would be unquestionably in favour of such measures. But a key part of the discipline is testing when the use of government powers is justified, legitimate, and proportionate to the objectives governments are trying to achieve, and holding governments accountable for the misuse (or failure to use), their public health powers. It is crucial to critique the use of extraordinary government powers, particularly if accompanied by the suspension of usual human rights protection measures, and media freedoms.
These kinds of tensions between individual rights and collective goods also play out in relation to legal measures to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer, which are now the leading cause of preventable death and illness globally. Governments have introduced a range of legal measures that address the risk factors for these diseases: some examples include restrictions on tobacco marketing, taxes on sugary drinks, and minimum floor prices for alcoholic drinks. Laws on NCD risk factors – particularly diet – are sometimes presented as the new, ‘fringe’ dimension of public health law, but measures such as sugary drinks taxes have been used (effectively) by governments around in the world.
There is a perception that the law shouldn’t be used to address these kinds of issues because they lack the fundamental justification found in infectious disease control measures: NCDs are by their nature non-infectious, and the development of a chronic illness is one person doesn’t pose a risk of transmission to others. Yet we accept a degree of government paternalism in many areas of public risk and safety (think of laws requiring seatbelt use, for example). This argument also ignores the huge costs these diseases impose on societies, economies, and healthcare systems, and would remove one of the most effective tools for preventing NCDs from governments’ toolboxes.
The discipline of public health law also acknowledges the critical health impact of laws outside the field of public health. Modern public health understands the determinants of health and illness as a set of interacting causes that operate at the individual level (genes, biology, and health behaviours), and encompass the conditions in which people live and work, their access to resources such as housing, education, and income, and the broader structural, economic, and cultural dimensions of our societies. Law itself can be seen as one of these broad, ‘social determinants‘ of health.
Addressing the social determinants of health requires changes to a wide range of laws and policies, including those on employment, housing, and social welfare. So, for example, organisations such as ChangeLab Solutions (a US public health law non-profit) have developed guidance on how urban planning laws can be designed to promote healthy and equitable communities. Social welfare laws in Australia have been analysed for their impact on the diets of people in lower income groups. As almost anything can be framed as a public health issue, so this brings to into question the legitimate scope of public health law, which can become the study of life, the universe, and everything.
As well as being interested in how law can address different illnesses and their causes, public health lawyers are concerned with the nature of ‘law’ and categorising the different powers available to governments to improve public health. In a foundational model, Lawrence Gostin describes these as the power to: tax and spend; alter the information environment; design and alter the physical environment; intervene in the economic system by addressing socio-economic disparities; directly regulate businesses, people, and professionals; and to deregulate when law and regulation is an impediment to public health. Clearly law is not just a prohibition on a particular form of activity or behaviour but is a mechanism to shape social norms, economic markets, and physical and informational environments.
The discipline of public health law understands that often there is not just one law operating in isolation, but that attention needs to be paid to supporting regulations and codes of practice (or in the case of international treaties, documents such as interpretive comments), as well as any case law interpreting statutory provisions. In some areas, the main source of law may be case law (or statute law), depending on jurisdiction. Understanding the interactions different legislative and regulatory instruments, and between legislation and case law, is a key skill that lawyers bring to the field of public health.
Lawyers also bring to the study of public health an understanding of the fundamental principles of the legal system (which obviously differ according to jurisdiction), including the division of powers between federal, state, and local governments, and how the powers and functions of each level of government are determined by legislative and constitutional frameworks. For example, the issue of pre-emption is critical in the US, where there is growing concern about state governments enacting new laws to limit the ability of public health officials and local government to introduce Covid-19 control measures.
Forms of regulation or governance developed by non-government actors are also increasingly important to public health, particularly in addressing obesity and diet-related health, which has seen the rise of industry self-regulation and collaborative partnerships with ‘Big Food’ in areas such as regulating junk food marketing to children. Public health law draws attention to the wide range of ‘soft’, collaborative, or voluntary forms of regulation developed by, or involving, businesses, trade industry bodies and NGOs. Some of these forms of ‘private regulation’ are just as complex and detailed as laws developed by governments. Public health law researchers pay close attention to the terms and conditions, implementation, and enforcement of these initiatives, as these are key factors which ultimately determine their impact on public health outcomes.
Lawyers have other specialised skills that we apply in public health law research. These include an understanding of the conventions and rules that should be followed in interpreting a legal document, and the ability to systematically identify, synthesize and analyse case law and legislation. This forms one important component of public health law research: ‘policy surveillance’, which can be used to create large databases of legal instruments that are a powerful tool for analysing law’s effect on health. Lawyers can also draft legislation and other legal documents relevant to public health.
But public health law research goes far beyond doctrinal analysis. As with other areas of legal research, it draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including health impact assessments, surveys, interviews and focus groups. It also uses theories from a variety of disciplines including epidemiology, law, sociology, political science, and psychology.
Public health law research is not simply the study of ‘law in books,’ though. Researchers analyse the implementation of laws, their enforcement, their impact on features of the physical environment relevant to health (think smoke-free laws), on people’s health-related behaviours, and on broader population health and equity outcomes. Researchers are interested in, for example, how laws on wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets are disproportionately enforced against homeless people or People of Colour. Consider too the argument that Covid-19 stay-at-home orders were used disproportionately against lower-income, diverse suburbs in Western Sydney, as compared to higher-income, majority white populations in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. Finally, public health law research is concerned with the unintended health impacts of laws that are not targeting health, as with the effect of laws criminalizing drug use on illicit drug users’ risk of contracting HIV.
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, there has been commentary, discussion, and analysis of public health law from people with a range of different professional backgrounds. That’s great: these laws should be poked and prodded from different angles. But don’t forget: there’s an entire discipline of legal researchers who have spent their careers investigating the role of law in creating the conditions for people to live healthy, fulfilling lives.
Sydney Health Law 
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