Lindsay F. Wiley

Public Health Law and Ethics defines these fields for a new generation. This bold and updated edition probes how the Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the legal landscape for public health practice. Through incisive analysis of public health legislation, judicial opinions, and scholarly research, this accessible primer articulates the scope and limits of governmental powers and duties to protect the public's health, builds a case for why social justice must be prioritized as a core value of public health ethics, examines the role of the courts in striking down democratically enacted laws, and covers today’s most pressing health issues, such as chronic diseases, opioid overdoses, gun violence, disability rights, sexual and reproductive autonomy, and racial and gender equity. The book creates a framework for ensuring public health interventions are based on sound scientific evidence and consistent with ethical values, revealing complex answers to the essential question of what community members owe one another when it comes to health.

Lawrence O. Gostin's seminal Public Health Law is widely acclaimed as the definitive statement on public health law at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this bold third edition, Gostin is joined by Lindsay F. Wiley to analyze major health threats of our time such as chronic diseases, emerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, bioterrorism, natural disasters, opiod overdose, and gun violence. The authors draw on constitutional law, administrative law, local government law, and tort law to develop their conception of law as a tool for protecting the public's health. The book creates an intellectual framework for modern public health law and supports that framework with illustrations of the scientific, political, and ethical issues involved. In proposing innovative solutions for the future of the public's health, Gostin and Wiley's essential study provides a blueprint for public and political debates to come. New issues covered in this edition: corporate personhood rights raised in response to regulations of tobacco, food and beverages, alcohol, firearms, prescription drugs, and marijuana; local government authority to protect the public's health; deregulation and harm reduction as modes of public health law intervention; taxation, spending, and alteration of the socioeconomic environment as modes of public health law intervention; access to health care as a strategy for protecting the public's health; taxation, spending, licensing, zoning, and shared-use strategies for chronic disease prevention; the public health law perspective on violence and injury prevention; and health justice as a framework for reducing health disparities and protecting the public's health.