Towards Effective Legal Scrutiny of Public Health Interventions
The Team: Dr Rebekah McWhirter, Professor Catherine Bennett, Gabrielle Wolf
Courts in Australia and internationally struggle to engage with empirical evidence and risk when examining public health interventions, instead defaulting to deference to medical opinion. Further, they inevitably provide point-in-time decisions, severely limiting the ability to account for changing risk-benefit ratios as evidence about the efficacy and impact of a particular intervention or disease emerges over time. As a result, the law currently provides little protection from overly-restrictive policies, or policies that do not meet the standards for good public health practice. Legal epidemiology, a discipline emerging out of the United States that seeks to bring rigor to the evaluation of legal interventions that affect public health, brings a transdisciplinary approach to public health law and offers a potential framework for dealing with this problem. This project will investigate the extent of this problem in Australian public health law, using doctrinal, sociolegal and qualitative research methods to identify potential mechanisms for improving the integration of epidemiology and law, in order to bridge the gap between disciplines in a way that assists courts in evaluating the impacts of specific public health laws.
Chief Investigator: Dr Rebekah McWhirter, Senior lecturer in Health Ethics Law and Business Professionalism.
Collaborators: Professor Catherine Bennett, Professor and Chair of Epidemiology and Associate Professor in Law and History, Gabrielle Wolf, both of Deakin University.