Scott Burris, professor of law at Temple University and director of the Robert Wood Johnson Public Health Law Research Center, and Evan Anderson, senior legal fellow at PHLR, explore the unique challenges of the new field of public health law research in an editorial in the latest American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Burris and Anderson respond to a study in that journal on the public health effects of community use of schools, "a quantitative study mapping the prevalence, distribution, and characteristics of a type of law across multiple jurisdictions. This is a form of legal research, but one that in its methods, purposes, and utility is quite different from interpretive legal research as traditionally practiced, as a form of craft, by lawyers."