Integrating Public Health and Social Justice Teaching in Law

Public Health in Bioethics and Legal Education: The basic fodder of law school courses (case law, statutes, and regulations) often fails to place legal concepts in a social context. Including Public Health Law in the law school curriculum is one way to seamlessly integrate social justice into the pedagogy. With public health's focus on populations, concerns of social justice are necessarily addressed. Public Health Law advocate, Wendy Parmet, asserts that “Lawyers should be able to think critically about populations and what it means to focus on them, as opposed to individuals.” Incorporating public health into the law school curriculum enables us to teach the next generation of lawyers not just a new way of thinking, but a new way of practicing which involves a commitment to balancing individual rights and liberties with promotion of the common good, enabling students as practitioners to better serve the communities in which they practice.