Public Health Law and Regulation critically evaluates the interaction between law and public health, asking how law and regulation support best practice in public health. The book explains the legal and regulatory regimes established to achieve public health objectives, providing detailed analysis in the areas of sanitation, food, drugs, and communicable disease. It also explains and analyses key approaches and issues, such as:

• a coherent "risk based" approach to public health law;
• the interface between laws protecting the environment and laws protecting human health;
• the role of regulation in obtaining compliance;
• the application of a "public health approach" to legislation;
• responses to emerging public health threats, particularly non-communicable diseases caused by 21st-century lifestyles.

Importantly, Public Health Law and Regulation anticipates future issues that will need to be addressed, including the twin concerns of new and incurable epidemics and deliberate infection through bioterrorism.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: Public health law: scope, structure and issues, and introduction
CHAPTER 2: The tools for regulation: Parliament, courts and administration
CHAPTER 3: The framework of public health law
CHAPTER 4: Ideas about regulation
Case Study 1: The liability of governments in the exercise of their statutory duties
CHAPTER 5: A risk-based approach to regulation
CHAPTER 6: Environmental health and the health of the environment - The environmental protection and planning systems
CHAPTER 7: Food law
CHAPTER 8: Communicable disease
Case Study 2: Legionella - Investigation of an outbreak - by Priscilla Robinson
CHAPTER 9: Drugs

Table of Cases
Table of Statutes
Bibliography
Index

"Predominantly a student text, it also provides guidance for practitioners in this increasingly complex and emerging area of cross-jurisdictional law. Probably the first of many editions....

The text is engagingly and clearly written.... The area traversed is vast....

As a practitioner's text this is a good beginning. It is well footnoted and indexed. It provides a conceptual framework for this developing area of law, perhaps as tort once did for the varying actions on the case. If the authors are right this may be what we are seeing develop. "Nuisance," they write, "has been described by the torts lawyer John Fleming as 'the law's contribution to the environment'... ". The bringing together of the disparate themes under the umbrella of public health law may be recognising a new cause of action, an obligation imposed not to so conduct affairs as to expose persons to the risk of ill health. I don't think they say this anywhere, but by the third edition they probably will.

In short a very good introduction to the expectations of a modern society toward protecting its health, the power of government to regulate and the courts to enforce those obligations created."

-- James Crotty, Tasmanian Law Society Newsletter, December 2004