Training in Public Health Law: Limitations of Competency-Based Models

In the past five years there has been a growing interest in public health law and in training individuals in public health law. To accommodate that growing interest there has been a rise in available materials, courses, and organizations organized to provide training to public health practitioners and lawyers in public health law. The majority of these materials rely on competency-based models that are uncommon in legal pedagogy and that do not reflect the practice of law. This disconnect does a disservice to both public health and to law and likely impedes the effective use of the law by public health practitioners. This presentation will describe the competency-based models exploring their limitations, and the impact those limitations have for understanding public health and understanding the role of law. Specifically, competency-based models focus on public law enforced through the state public health infrastructure. These models do not take into account the role of private law and non-state actors in the public health system. A competency-based focus also fails to capture the role of customary or common law in legal practice and its role in public health. This focus produces an overly narrow view of the public health infrastructure. This limitation has implications for conceptions of international law also as competency-based models will tend to emphasize international agreements and state actors without taking into account the role of customary law or non-state actors in the international arena.