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

Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, JD, MA, is Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health and Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is the director of the Master’s in Public Health and Master’s in Public Policy joint degree program at Brown University. Her research and writing focus on socioeconomic, racial, gender-based and legal drivers of health and health inequity; public health law and policy; poverty law and the social and healthcare safety nets; and health system and community-based interventions that promote health equity. She teaches, writes and consults in the areas of health justice, healthcare law and policy, public health law, and medical and public health ethics.Professor Tobin-Tyler is an international expert in the development of medical-legal partnerships, which integrate healthcare, public health and legal services to identify, address and prevent health-harming social and legal needs of underserved patients and populations. She is senior editor and a contributor to the first textbook on the topic, Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership, published in 2011. She has published numerous articles and blogs -- including in Academic Medicine, Public Health Reports, The Lancet, Health Affairs, Health and Human Rights, Journal of Legal Medicine, Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Journal of Health and Biomedical Law, Journal of Health Care Law and Policy, the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, American Journal of Preventive Medicine and American Journal of Public Health.Professor Tobin-Tyler has served on numerous advisory boards and committees related to health justice – including the State of Rhode Island Pregnancy and Postpartum Death Review Committee, the Advisory Board for the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, and the Advisory Council for the Child and Family Policy Center’s Learning Collaborative on Health Equity and Young Children. She is also the recipient of several awards including the pro bono service award from the Legal Services Corporation, the Distinguished Advocate award from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, and for multiple years, the Dean's Excellence in Teaching award at the Alpert Medical School. She has also been selected for several fellowships, including as a Postgraduate Fellow in Public Policy by the A. Alfred Taubman Center at Brown, as a Bray Visiting Scholar at the Cogut Center for Humanities at Brown, and as a Public Health Law Education Faculty Fellow by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 2018-2019, she served a visiting fellow at the Law, Health, Justice Centre at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Joel Teitelbaum, JD, LLM, is professor of public health and law, director of the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. For 11 years served as vice-chair for academic affairs for the Department of Health Policy and Management. Professor Teitelbaum has taught law, graduate, or undergraduate courses on healthcare law, healthcare civil rights, public health law, minority health policy, and long-term care law and policy. He was the first member of the School of Public Health faculty to receive the University-wide Bender Teaching Award, he has received the School’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and he is a member of the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers and the School’s Academy of Master Teachers. He has authored or co-authored dozens of peer-reviewed articles and reports in addition to many book chapters, policy briefs, and blogs on law and social drivers of health, health equity, civil rights issues in health care, health reform and its implementation, medical–legal partnership, and insurance law and policy, and he has delivered more than 100 invited lectures/presentations at leading universities and national conferences. In addition to Essentials of Health Justice, he is co-author of Essentials of Health Policy and Law (Fifth Edition). In 2000, Professor Teitelbaum was corecipient of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, which he used to explore the creation of a new framework for applying Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the modern healthcare system. Among other organizations, Professor Teitelbaum is a member of Delta Omega, the national honor society recognizing excellence in the field of public health, and the ASPH/Pfizer Public Health Academy of Distinguished Teachers. In 2016, during President Obama’s second term, Professor Teitelbaum became the first lawyer named to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives (a.k.a. “Healthy People”), the national agenda aimed at improving the health of all Americans over a 10-year span. He serves as a member of the board of advisors of PREPARE, a national advanced care planning organization, and on multiple committees of the American Bar Association: as a liaison to the Task Force on Eviction, Housing Stability, and Equity, as an advisor to the Coordinating Committee on Veterans Benefits and Services, and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Public Health Legal Services Research Project in the Center for Human Rights.