ABSTRACT

Within the evolving public health agenda, we fi nd an expanding claim to ‘jurisdiction’ intrinsic to the idea of public health itself. While medical law is widely viewed as imposing external norms (i.e. legal rules and regulation) on a contained practice (i.e. medicine), defi - nitions of public health include law and regulation within them, with their attention on modes of social coordination (see also the discussion of the controlling and facilitative functions of public law in Chapter 7 ). Think, for example, about how law and regulation are captured by Winslow’s representation of public health, presented in Chapter 1 . 2 In that purposive defi nition of the fi eld, and others that have evolved from it, a subtle array of regulatory measures is implicated. These range from the ‘hardest’ of coercive laws (‘police powers’), through other legal and policy measures (e.g. in maintaining a clean environment, ensuring

and even incorporating ‘softer’ means of social control (‘development of social machinery’). It is our argument that the fi eld of public health law, to be adequate to its task, must be able to encompass this very disparate range of practical approaches. 3 And, whilst we would argue that public health practice naturally includes law, it is also necessarily contained and constrained by law.