Teaching Health Law Outside a Law School 

Michelle Mello, JD, PhD

For the past four years, I’ve taught a course in Public Health Law in a school of public health. My students are a mix of Master of Science students with a couple years of health-related work experience; M.P.H. students, who often are mid-career lawyers and physicians; and Ph.D. students. I’ve never taught in a law school, but I remember being a law student well enough to recognize some differences between teaching in a law school and teaching in a public health or medical school. Here are a few things I’ve learned that have improved my course over the years.

• Respect the cultural differences. Law professors may be accustomed to quite hierarchical faculty-student relationships, a highly degree of deference from students, and formal classroom styles. Public health schools have a different culture. Students are respectful, but relationships tend to be more egalitarian and conversations, both inside and outside the classroom, more informal. Rather than taking umbrage when a student calls you by your first name, take advantage of the ease with which you can make a personal connection with students. In class, be conversational, be funny, and let yourself be educated by your students’ life experiences. You may have a firm grasp of treatment refusal cases, but that physician in the back row has actually cared for a child whose parents decided to withdraw life support. Finally, learn to love PowerPoint. It’s prevalent in health professional schools, and if used effectively, can really enrich your lecture. For example, can you find a photo of the plaintiff in the case you’re discussing? Can you present some graphical data about the effect of gun laws on crime rates?

• Treat students like the professionals they are. Students who come from professional settings approach school differently from recent undergraduates. They tend to think of themselves as your colleague as much as your student, and want to receive the same respect in the classroom that they do in the workplace. My first year, I tried cold-calling on students and being as Socratic with them as my law school professors had been with me. They resented it. Now, I still call on people, but I give them time to prepare (I usually assign commentators for each case at the beginning of each class); my questioning is softer; and my goal is to maintain comfort in the room.

• Understand the anxieties and contributions that students bring to class. Your class will likely include students with and without a legal background, and people with varying degrees and kinds of work experience. Non-lawyers tend to be intimidated by the idea of competing with lawyers for grades in a law class. They need a little extra help in the beginning. I hold a special session on how to read and brief a case, how to do an “IRAC” analysis, how litigation proceeds through the courts, and how the U.S. government is structured (some of your students won’t be American). Whenever a legal term comes up in a case or lecture, I make sure to define it. I find that students’ confidence in their legal analytical skills grows fast with a little nurturing. I also try to draw out the unique contributions that each student has to make to class discussion. In the first class, I ask students to describe their professional backgrounds and I take notes. That way, when that case about abortion speech restrictions for federally-funded family planning clinics comes up, I can call on the former Planned Parenthood employee to describe how the clinic operated under the restriction.

• Focus on the big picture. Your students are learning about health law not because they want to be lawyers, but because they want to shape health policy or be a leader in clinical or public health practice. They may have a natural curiosity about how judges think, but they’re primarily there to understand the forces that shape policy and the laws that will empower and constrain them in their professional lives. I don’t dissect the tropes of judicial opinions or discuss theories of jurisprudence with my students. Rather, I focus on giving them (1) a basic understanding of important legal provisions and principles, and (2) a sense of the political, social, economic, and cultural context in which health lawmaking takes place. One benefit of this approach is that it makes the course interesting for lawyers even though they have read some of the cases before. They tell me we read them in a very different way and they come away with a new perspective.

Finally, be prepared to answer questions about how students can make careers in health law. A well-taught health law course will inspire at least a handful of public health and medical students to consider law school. Your thoughts about what a lawyer can contribute to health policymaking, and what a public health or medical professional can contribute to health lawyering, will be highly valued—and hopefully will attract talented students to this important work.