Injury control has gained gradual acceptance as both a public policy concern and the focus of scholarly research during the last decade. Observers have noted the costs to American society of both intentional and unintentional injuries and have sought to identify preventive intervention strategies that can reduce their incidence and impact. Although many of these intervention efforts have just begun, researchers have been far more successful at identifying potential strategies for the prevention of unintentional than for intentional injury. Indeed, many observers have asked whether the majority of intentional injuries can be prevented at all. In this paper I examine the various problems associated with the prevention of intentional injuries such as homicide, assaultive violence, and suicide. Homicide among blacks is used to illustrate the variety of theoretical, ideological and practical concerns that must be confronted in efforts to successfully prevent intentionally induced injury.

Proponents of efforts to designate injury, both intentional and unintentional, as a health concern have suggested that one result of such a designation will be the development of more effective strategies for the prevention of injuries.

In 1959, California became the first state to enact legislation protecting good Samaritans from tort liability under certain circumstances. While previously a good samaritan giving aid in an emergency could be held liable only if he acted unreasonably, there was no legislative mandate to affirmatively discourage an injured party from bringing suit against the good samaritan. Although few such cases can be documented, the absence of legislative protection was thought to work a serious detriment to the prompt rendition of aid in emergency conditions, since some medical practitioners might refrain from giving emergency aid for fear of being subjected to legal action. In response to this perceived situation, California enacted its legislation to encourage the giving of emergency aid and to “sufficiently allay [the good samaritan's] fears of legal action:”

Currently, good samaritan statutes exist in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands. These statutes range from the very broad to the very specific, and each is supposedly designed to protect the good samaritan emergency care provider from frivolous litigation. However, developments in recent years have caused commentators to question whether the central purpose behind these statutes—to discourage legal action—has actually been achieved.

The cover story of the June 12, 1978, issue of TIME magazine characterized the US. Department of Health, Education and Welfare as The Beneficent Monster. The physicians and lawyers of this nation often find themselves acting as sometime keepers and trainers of The Monster in many of its activities. While numbers of monstrous proportions may not intimidate the current generations who have witnessed the coining of the words googol (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros) or googolplex (10 raised to the 100th power), most of us are impressed when we discover that millions are affected and billions of dollars spent annually by the Social Security Administration.

That we will come into contact with The Monster is quite likely: As individuals we may become members of the beneficiary population; as practicing professionals, we may be involved in pursuing for another what may appear to be a tortuous process to guide that person to benefit status under the Social Security Administration Disability Programs.

Today's practicing physicians and attorneys can be assured of increasing contact with the legal and insurance issues stemming from the adverse consequences of a patient's injuries or illnesses. Mounting litigation involving alleged medical negligence as a cause of personal injury, and expanding social legislation and insurance programs which provide benefits to injured or disabled persons, their dependents, or their beneficiaries has required an increase in the medical problem issues encountered in processing and resolving contested claims. Evaluations of such claimants by physicians are essential to the proper handling of their legal and insurance claims.

Medical evaluations performed specifically to provide information to the legal system and the expression of medical opinions formed after such evaluations constitute an area of medicine best termed Forensic Medicine. The traditional concept of “forensic medicine” was limited almost entirely to the medical investigation of the causes of death and the results of trauma, injury, and violent crimes. Forensic medicine practitioners were generally restricted to pathologists who performed medicolegal autopsies.

Nurses have traditionally encouraged people to live, regardless of the meaning or consequences of continued life for the client. Despair profound enough to lead to a suicide attempt is viewed as an illness that must be cured. Nurses, as well as physicians, subscribe to the maxim primum non nocere (first, do no harm), although it may not be as clearly articulated in the canons of the nursing profession as it is in those of medicine. Nurses, for the most part, operate under the belief that suicide is always both mentally unhealthy and morally wrong; thus all efforts are made to prevent suicide. The idea that life is good and worthwhile and must be preserved at all costs applies to a wide variety of clients, including those who engage in behaviors that will probably lead to serious illness or death (e.g., overeating, smaoking, and suicide).

Nurses confront a variety of ethical and legal issues in both practice and education, and questions of rights, obligations, and duties arise which can have life and death consequences. Questions reflect the conflict between patients' rights and professional obligations, and between the use of resources for one individual at the expense of others.

As general counsel to one of the largest hospitals in the United States, I want to discuss a topic which affects 15 to 20 patients in our hospital every day, those on whom physicians have written what we call “DNR” orders (Do Not Resuscitate). Any large tertiary care hospital has to deal regularly with this problem with respect to patients who are terminally ill and how to treat such patients in a wide variety of circumstances. What are the physician's and the hospital's obligations to provide Care?

On November 28,1977, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down its opinion in a case that has caused tremendous repercussions in hospitals throughout the country regarding the withholding or withdrawal of life-support to terminally ill patients. At the time this opinion was handed down, the decisions of physicians and hospitals on what to do with respect to withdrawing such care were based primarily on one of four models.

This first-of-its-kind national survey of 485 psychiatrists in nine states and the District of Columbia (DC) finds substantial evidence of clinicians being uninformed, misinformed, and misinforming patients of their gun rights regarding involuntary commitments and voluntary inpatient admissions. A significant percentage of psychiatrists (36.9%) did not understand that an involuntary civil commitment triggered the loss of gun rights, and the majority of psychiatrists in states with prohibitors on voluntary admissions (57%) and emergency holds (56%) were unaware that patients would lose gun rights upon voluntary admission or temporary commitment. Moreover, the survey found evidence that psychiatrists may use gun rights to negotiate “voluntary” commitments with patients: 15.9% of respondents reported telling patients they could preserve their gun rights by permitting themselves to be voluntarily admitted for treatment, in lieu of being involuntarily committed. The results raise questions of whether psychiatrists obtained full informed consent for voluntary patient admissions, and suggest that some medical providers in states with voluntary admission prohibitor laws may unwittingly deprive their patients of a constitutional right. The study calls into question the fairness of state prohibitor laws as policy, and — at minimum — indicates an urgent need for psychiatrist training on their state gun laws.

Just Transition, an organizing and policy framework that has emerged from the climate justice movement, is a powerful upstream response to health disparities created by structural subordination. As the public health field pushes itself to address the “cause of causes” of unjust health disparities, Just Transition offers new possibilities for partnership and collective action. We introduce the Just Transition framework, explain its relevance to the concerns of health justice advocates, and provide some examples of how the two movements might work together.

This paper aims to characterize the main actors in the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry — national companies, foreign companies and public laboratories — and analyze how they were affected and how they reacted to changes over the last 30 years in the institutional framework. The results show that national companies have been gaining prominence in the Brazilian pharmaceutical market with their internationalization movement and their strengthening of innovation strategies.

Unmet legal needs contribute to housing, income, and food insecurity, along with other conditions that harm health and drive health inequity. Addressing health injustice requires new tools for the next generations of lawyers, doctors, and other healthcare professionals. An interprofessional group of co-authors argue that law and medical schools and other university partners should develop and cultivate Academic Medical-Legal Partnerships (A-MLPs), which are uniquely positioned to leverage service, education, and research resources, to advance health justice.

The World Health Assembly has encouraged WHO member-states to establish capacity in health technology assessment (HTA) as a support for achieving universal health coverage (UHC). Simultaneously, the WHO has stated that UHC is “a practical expression of the concern for health equity and the right to health.” This has prompted questions about potential tensions between priority-setting efforts and the right to health on the road to UHC. South Africa (SA) is an ideal setting in which to explore how the priority-setting work of an HTA body may be integrated with an existing rights framework.

Many formerly incarcerated people have civil legal needs that can imperil their successful re-entry to society and, consequently, their health. We categorize these needs and assess their association with cardiovascular disease risk factors in a sample of recently released people. We find that having legal needs related to debt, public benefits, housing, or healthcare access is associated with psychosocial stress, but not uncontrolled high blood pressure or high cholesterol, in the first three months after release.

The prison-industrial complex has historically operated as a mechanism for social control generally and as a tool to restrict women’s reproductive capacities specifically. Reproductive justice is a domain within the practice of health law. However, health law as currently practiced is ill-equipped to understand how the carceral state functions as a structural determinant of health or how legacies of oppression have facilitated the abridgment of incarcerated women’s reproductive capacities.