Public Health Law II - Updates

For those of you following my journal and registering for my advanced class in public health law, I must apologize that the syllabus is not yet ready or available. Blackboard is not yet functioning for the class. If I do not have Blackboard on Monday, I will email readings and syllabi to those of you currently enrolled in the class. If you are interested in the class but have not enrolled, do so as soon as possible.

Public Health Law II - Advanced Topics in Public Health Law

Public Health Law Over Two Semesters

At the the University of Connecticut Health Center, which houses the Graduate Program in Public Health at the University of Connecticut, we require Public Health Law as a core course for graduating and obtaining an MPH from our program. After teaching the course in the past, I proposed to the curriculum committee that the material could be better presented if split into two classes: Public Health Law I and Public Health Law II—known as Public Health Law and Advanced Topics in Public Health on the PUBH side. Using principles of backward design. They agreed.

I redesigned the original course to provide core basics that every public health student should understand and am designing the second course to allow students with a interest in law and policy to drive more deeply into public health law as applied and some of the more difficult legal issues, e.g. preemption, administrative law, and public health law research.

To accomodate as many students as possible, the curriculum has been altered slightly. I will be teaching Public Health Law II in the Spring of 2012 and the Spring of 2013. I will also be teaching Public Health Law I in the Fall of 2012. This post is to clarify information for students interested in taking the class and to answer some logistical questions. If you have questions about the class not answered here, feel free to contact me.

Schedule The second course Public Health Law II / Advanced Topics in Public Health Law (PHLAW2) conflicts with the core MPH course Environmental Health on Wednesday nights. We looked at many alternatives. There was no way to move the course. Environmental Health and PHLAW2 will both be held in the Spring on Wednesday nights in 2012 and 2013. We hope this will give everyone a chance to take the course if you are interested. You should plan your schedule accordingly knowing that if you do not take your core course in 2012, you must take it in 2013.

Books PHLAW2 will require three books:

1. The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt.
2. Food Politics by Marion Nestle
3. The Bluebook

All other readings will be cases or materials available online for download. No materials will be required on reserve.

Topics The course will cover the following topics:

• Preemption
• Administrative Law
• Complex Torts
• Commerce Clause
• Non-Profit Governance
• The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
• Public Health Law Research

Again, if you have questions, feel free to contact me. The syllabus should be complete soon and will be posted online.

Scott Burris on Public Health Law

U.S. apologies for STD studies, value of anger and DFW

First week of teaching and the first night of Public Health Law. Tonight's lecture is on history of public health and the state with discussion of the Public Health Service. PHS has been in the news lately with its brutal studies of STDs on Guatemalans without their consent. Some Guatemalan officials are referring to it as genocide. Apparently the lead researcher knew he was in trouble and tried to keep research secret.

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Proposal to modify ECPA: Requiring warrant

My cyberlaw and public health students should find this interesting. ArsTechnica reports that Leahy proposes requiring warrants for search of cloud data and email in a change to ECPA. Would the public health exemption to the 4th Amendment then apply?

Twitter, Backchannels and Graduate Teaching

I will be teaching Public Health Law this coming academic term. I have suggested and have received UCHC's preliminary blessing to split the course into two semesters. The first is our core course on public health law and will provide the necessary foundational instruction for students and is a requirement for graduation. The second, probably titled "Advanced Seminar in Public Health Law" will delve into more complex topic areas including: cyberlaw, administrative law, preemption in detail, complex tort actions, PPACA, food law and obesity, environmental law, intellectual property and public health law research. These courses are still under development and will be cross-listed as law courses at UCONN law school. (The UCONN Law course descriptions and numbers are already up). More on these classes later.

As I complete the syllabus, I have been considering the use of social media. I tend to provide class materials on this site for my own reference. Because I teach students from several different schools—medical, public health, law—keeping the class organized in one spot on the cloud is difficult. The public health and medical students use Blackboard, the law students TWEN. For the first time this year, I am considering using Twitter as a class backchannel. Essentially, students can use Twitter to post comments and questions using a course hashtag.

The question becomes one of monitoring. Do other professors who use this monitor the channel during class? I use a modified Socratic method in teaching which can be difficult for the public health students initially. I am trying to set up systems to help them get their questions answered and to build a relationship among the students in class while improving their access to me. I wold also like there be a way to crowd-source their learning. If a public health student is reading a case that mentions iintermediate scrutiny, perhaps using Twitter he can get an answer from a law student colleague faster than from me. If a law student doesn't understand differences between incidence and prevalence, perhaps she can use Twitter for a quick answer from fellow students. Teaching this class in the past, I realized from post-class evaluations and analysis that students who built relationships across law and public health did much better than their peers that did not.

Do other professors have experience with this?

Translating Public Health to Law and Policy: Writing

Teaching public health law, public health policy, and related classes, it comes to my attention that students often have difficulty translating public health into language that lawyers, law-makers, and policy types understand. I find that the biggest problem is a cultural one.

Public Health

Public health is a field that is focused on (1) evidence and (2) ethics to drive its decision-making. First, public health relies on evidence. That reliance requires public health students to be able to support their assertions with scientific evidence and, in the absence of data, very educated guesses. That information is presented in extreme detail with discussions of the limitations of the evidence, methodological issues, and statistical issues involved in the data. Second, public health is primarily concerned with an ethic that values social justice. This isn't in opposition to law and policy. I find though that in public health the complexity of the ethical and moral issues are often lost in a broader context and there is a diminished focus on issues of distributive justice.

Law and Policy

In contrast, governance has different values. Key here are three: 1. ambiguity, 2. parallel processing, and 3. ethics. First, governance relies on evidence but operates in an environment of ambiguity where different values and issues vie with evidence to provide justification. Here the evidence is not on the "correct" position but evidence for the "best" position to take given a highly context-driven set of circumstances and ambiguity. Traditional public health students are not prepared to make presentations or provide information to meet these needs. Second, governments and policy makers operate on parallel processes. Simply, governments do not make decisions in a serial fashion. Instead, many decisions are being made at the same time. This puts an extreme time constraint on the public health practitioner to get the message across to the policy maker. It also requires that the public health practitioner understand the overal values that drive the parallel decision-making. Third, ethics. Governance also operates with an ethic but unlike public health, it operates within a larger framework of rule of law, distributive justice and procedure. These ethical concerns can be in harmony with public health ethics, but the practitioner in public health cannot ignore these larger issues.

The Fix 

How do you fix this? I try and fix it by teaching basic policy in all my courses, requiring students to give presentations in the pecha kucha format and recommending two books. The first is a classic: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by Zinsser. I always recommend this book to students who often fail to read it. Not reading this book can have a demonstrable effect on your grade in classes I teach. The second should be a classic: Effective Lawyering: A Checklist Approach to Legal Writing and Oral Argument. I have no idea what's up with the price on Parrish and Yokoyama but I recommend it more highly than Zinsser if you need to get your writing up to speed quickly for law and policy audiences. While designed for lawyers, it is just as applicable to the public health student who needs to write a policy brief. If you are studying public health or public health policy, these two books can help you translate from the public health mindset to make convincing arguments for law and policy types.

Public Health Law Fall 2009: Course Statistics and Final Exam

Public Health Law, Fall 2009 is complete. All the grades have been submitted. I often get a lot of questions from students about their grades, and how they could have done better. I like to make some of the class data available so students can have a context for their grade and the outcome. I also like to post a copy of the final exam for students taking the class in the future. Having an old exam will provide some reference to the type of exam you can expect taking the class from me in the future.

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