How science can help make, assess and amend laws better: Lessons from ‘legal epidemiology’

Senior advocate Anand Grover interviews Scott Burris, Professor of Law, Temple School of Law, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

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Scott, please tell us how you started working on legal epidemiology.

A: We began working on legal epidemiology as part of a strategy to increase the effective use of law for public health and to increase awareness of the ways in which law could be hurting public health.

In most places in the world, there has been relatively little research on the effects that law has, including its effects on health. This makes no sense, given that law has a pervasive influence on health.

We use law as an intervention, e.g., laws against smoking in public; laws setting speed limits or other driving rules. But we also use law to establish the powers and duties and jurisdictions of agencies in the government, which obviously has a lot to do with what that agency can do for public health.

Finally, the rest of laws, that may say nothing about health explicitly, also often have very powerful health effects, e.g., laws that regulate access to housing; or tax laws that shape the distribution of income and wealth in a society have very powerful effects on health.

They directly influence the social determinants of health so that the kind of law which we call incidental health law may be the most important kind of law to study of all.

Did you find that the effects of law were not being studied and, therefore, you ventured into it? How did you pick on these issues?

It is absolutely the case that law is studied far less than other phenomena that influence health. We did a study on the funding of research on law and health by the National Institutes of Health over a 25-year period and found that less than 0.01 percent of all grants supported any kind of research on the health effects of laws.