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Lawrence O. Gostin, Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 491 pp. $29.95 paper, $65.00 hardcover.
In the last two decades, no one has trumpeted the importance of law to public health more broadly or eloquently than Professor Lawrence Gostin, a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and the Co-Director of the Program on Law and Public Health at both universities. In numerous books and articles he has analyzed the intersections between law and public health in the United States and has argued tirelessly that properly designed laws can be vital players in the public health system.
Public Health Law: Power, Duty, and Restraint is, without doubt, Professor Gostin's magnum opus, at least for now. It is an ambitious book that attempts, and often succeeds, to conceptualize the field of U.S. public health law in all its variations. Written for academics and practitioners, public health professionals and lawyers, the book's goals are audacious. In many ways, Professor Gostin has met them. But, as is often the case with ambitious interdisciplinary enterprises, both public health professionals and lawyers may question whether their field has been treated with the complexity and sophistication it merits.
Undoubtedly, the book's most valuable contribution is its very existence. For many years, lawyers neglected public health. Starting in the early 1900s, medicine began to overshadow public health, and by the late 1900s the eclipse was almost complete. Similarly, health law and the many attendant legal questions that comprise it (including the standard of care, informed consent, the right to health insurance, and the right to die) came to dominate the legal profession's relationship with human health. Public health law, which was once a central component of public law, faded from view.
The evisceration of public health law as a field of practice and inquiry did not mean, of course, that law ceased to affect public health. To the contrary, even when public health law was "off stage," law continued to influence population health. Sometimes this occurred through legal mechanisms and regimes that were directed at public health problems but were no longer thought of "as public health law." For example,...