Public Health Laws and Regulations

What Is Public Health Law?

Public health law is a field that focuses legal practice, scholarship, and advocacy on issues involving the government’s legal authorities and duties “to ensure the conditions for people to be healthy,” and how to balance these authorities and duties with “individual rights to autonomy, privacy, liberty, property and other legally protected interests.”

The scope of public health law is broad. Public health law issues range from narrow questions of legal interpretation to complex matters involving public health policy, social justice and ethics.

Read more about this topic in What Is Public Health Law(PDF, 181KB), a publication of the The Network for Public Health Law.

Here are some of the federal, state, and local laws and regulations that the Lewis and Clark Public Health is required to follow and, in some cases, enforce: