Stanford University

U.S. Public Health Law — Foundations and Emerging Shifts

U.S. Public Health Law — Foundations and Emerging Shifts

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between individual rights and public health protection.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between individual rights and public health protection. This tension has long occupied U.S. courts, as witnessed by the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision upholding a smallpox vaccination mandate in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Today, although many through lines of public health law endure, some long-settled understandings are being contested and disrupted.

In this perspective published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Stanford Health Policy's Michelle Mello, a professor of health policy and professor of law, and Wendy Parmet of Northeastern University's Center for Health Policy and Law, review the Constitution and state and federal statutes to protect civil liberties relevant to the application of public health laws — including one of our most zealously protected rights: freedom of speech.

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