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The Impact of Law on Coronary Heart Disease: Some Preliminary Observations on the Relationship of Law to “Normalized” Conditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Wendy E. Parmet
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Extract

The relationship between law and a population’s health is complex and poorly understood. To the extent that scholarship exists on the subject, it has usually focused on epidemics that are concentrated in relatively vulnerable, marginalized communities. Often, individual behaviors are assumed to play a major role in the epidemiology of these diseases. Perhaps, as a result, these illnesses become stigmatized and the object of coercive laws, which in turn become the subject of litigation, legal debate, and ultimately scholarly analysis. Thus, to the extent that U.S. legal scholars have thought about public health in the last 30 years (and they seldom have), they have generally done so in the context of tuberculosis (TB), intravenous drug abuse, and a handful of similar conditions. Likewise, Jonathan Mann’s own appreciation of the importance of human rights to public health emerged in the wake of his work with HIV, which is perhaps the prototypical stigmatized disease.

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Article
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Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Winter 2002 , pp. 608 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2002

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