Integrating Diverse Theories for Public Health Law Evaluation

The National Program Office for Public Health Law Research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2009 to advance the field of public health law research - the scientific study of the relation of law and legal practices to population health. Promoting more and better research in this field depends in critical part on defining and disseminating research methods that are both rigorous and accessible to investigators trained in many different disciplines. This presentation offers an overview of public health law research as a multidisciplinary field, drawing upon law, public health, criminal justice, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and psychology, among many others, to articulate the manner in which law influences population health. The presentation describes the program's methodological work to date, including its efforts to standardize the collection and coding of legal data. It concludes by introducing and explaining the importance of the work presented in the remainder of this session: explanations, from several different theoretical traditions, of the mechanisms by which law influences behavior, and the research tools available to study these mechanisms at work.