Public Health Strategies: A Pathway for Public Health Practice to Leverage Law in Advancing Equity

This article outlines a pathway for public health departments and practitioners to incorporate law into their efforts to advance equity in health outcomes. We assert that examining and applying law can accelerate public health efforts to mitigate structural and systemic inequities, including racism. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the community impacts of policing have brought into sharp relief the inequities faced by many populations. These stark and explosive examples arise out of long-standing, persistent, and sometimes hidden structural and systemic inequities that are difficult to trace because they are embedded in laws and accompanying policies and practices. We emphasize this point with a case study involving a small, majority Black community in semirural Appalachia that spent almost 50 years attempting to gain access to the local public water system, despite being surrounded by water lines. We suggest that public health practitioners have a role to play in addressing these kinds of public health problems, which are so clearly tied to the ways laws and policies are developed and executed. We further suggest that public health practitioners, invoking the 10 Essential Public Health Services, can employ law as a tool to increase their capacity to craft and implement evidence-based interventions.