ABSTRACT
S tigma has become an important concept in publichealth law.1 It is widely accepted that certain diseasesare disfavored in society, leading to discrimination against people identified with them, which in turn has the tendency to drive an epidemic underground-i.e., to make it more difficult for voluntary public health programs to reach and succeed among populations bent on concealing their disease or risk status. The need to reduce stigma and its effects has been used to justify the passage of privacy and antidiscrimination law to protect people with HIV More recently, stigma has been part of the arsenal of justification for special genetic antidiscrimination and privacy law. Despite its importance, however, there is no single widely accepted definition of "stigma" in social science, and its relationship to law has been generally under-theorized and unsupported by data, reducing our ability to effectively deploy law and other tools in the anti-stigma cause. This essay will integrate current thinking about the nature and workings of stigma with current sociolegal research in the cause of clarifying the relationship between law and stigma in public health. This integrated view has implications for research, policy, and the day-to-day work of providing .effective care and prevention services for people with and at risk of stigmatized conditions. It also calls into question, from a moral standpoint, the claim that stigma can be used positively as a tool for changing behavior for the sake of public health.
