Inside Duke Medicine

Conference on law, gender and public health

A conference at the Duke University School of Law on Feb. 27 will explore the intersection of law and public health, with particular emphasis on gender, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

“Symptoms of Public Health Policy: Invisible Injuries, the Gendered Body and the Law” is sponsored by the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy. It will be held at the Duke Law School on Duke’s West campus.

The conference will bring together voices from a variety or disciplines including the law, medicine, and Women’s Studies.  Through a series of panel discussions, presenters will address how public health law and policy affect, and are affected by, issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Topics to be addressed include:  the proper role of the law in prenatal drug exposure; the hidden connection between HIV and domestic violence; how the law currently responds to both HIV prevention and living with HIV/AIDS; and a model for reforming US health care from the perspective of health law, medicine, and business and employment.

A full program is available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/symposium.

Professor Kim Blankenship of the Duke Global Health Institute will moderate the program.

This conference is free and open to the public and will be webcast live http://www.law.duke.edu/webcast/.  All panel discussions will be held at the Duke Law School in Room 3037.  A light lunch will be served. Audience members will have the opportunity to attend a “Women in Academia” panel sponsored by the Women Law Students Association during the lunch session.  Registration is required by Feb. 15.  On-site registration will be permitted if space remains.

The full conference schedule and registration information are online at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/symposium.  Please email eugenie.montague@law.duke.edu for more information or register at DJGLPPublichealth@gmail.com.

Public health is a broad and nebulous issue, including not only the global threat of diseases such as HIV/ AIDS and its disproportionate impact on certain vulnerable populations, but structural, economic, and sociological factors of poor health in our own communities.

This conference is designed to reflect the complexity of this issue, by bringing together perspectives of those who are looking at the discrete and largely hidden effect of laws and policies on specific populations, as well as those who are attempting to take a macro-level view of the issue to design comprehensive and preventive programs focused at both the community level and individual choices.