Introduction to Public Health Law

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of public health law. In contrast to healthcare law, public health law seeks to protect health at a broad population, as opposed to an individual patient, level. The field of public health emphasizes prevention and health promotion, as opposed to the treatment of disease. The chapter looks at three critical areas of public health law: communicable disease control, the control of noncommunicable diseases, and efforts to address the social determinants of health. While the United States and Europe face broadly similar questions, the answers given often differ. In part, this is because the European Union is for the most part a supranational organization, while the United States is a more integrated, albeit federal, nation state. In addition, important distinctions between the legal traditions and the value given to individual liberty versus the public good provide a focus of the comparison between the US and European approaches to public health.