Essentials of Health Justice: Law, Policy, and Structural Change

Given the national reckoning around structural inequity, racism, and intractable health inequalities, there is an unrequited demand among faculty and scholars who teach and write about health equity and social justice for texts that go beyond a discussion of the social determinants of health and access to care to provide analysis that offers a structural and legal lens for understanding entrenched health inequity in the U.S. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made the need for this approach more compelling and urgent. Addressing that need, authors Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler and Joel Teitelbaum have built upon and expanded their first edition with Essentials of Health Justice: Law, Policy and Structural Change, Second Edition. This unparalleled new edition explores the historical, structural, and legal underpinnings of racial, ethnic, gender-based, and ableist inequities in health, and provides a framework for students to consider how and why health inequity is tied to the ways that laws are structured and enforced. Additionally, it offers analysis of potential solutions and posits how law may be used as a tool to remedy health injustice. Written for a wide, interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars in public health, medicine, and law, as well as other health professions, this accessible text discusses both the systems and policies that influence health and explores opportunities to advocate for legal and policy change by public health practitioners and policymakers, physicians, health care professionals, lawyers, and lay people. Key Features: • Contextualizes health justice through examination of theoretical underpinnings and historical social justice movements • Provides analysis of how law and policy structure injustices that harm health and drive health inequities • Includes chapters on key systems and policies that drive health injustice – e.g., inequities in socioeconomic status, place-based inequities, the carceral state – and populations whose health is harmed – People of Color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities • Provides discussion and analysis of current legal and policy proposals and of possible options for the future • Offers learning objectives and key terms in each chapter. Discussion questions/answers for each chapter are available to faculty adopting the text • Includes Navigate eBook access (with the printed text) for convenient online or offline reading of the text from a computer, tablet, or smart phone.