Disaggregation of public health data by race and ethnicity is critical to understanding health disparities and driving progress toward health equity. While the federal government updated the minimum set of categories federal agencies must use when collecting race and ethnicity data, implementation of these standards remains uncertain. Additionally, federal standards set a floor; states can adopt laws requiring additional data collection specific to their population. As of May 2025, 13 states have passed laws to require disaggregation of race and ethnicity. One state – New York – is implementing the Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NHPI) Data Disaggregation Law. Challenges include finding effective pressure points for the state agencies that are required to update data and helping agencies access funding for necessary changes. In California, the 2024 Latine and Indigenous Health Disparities Act builds on previous data disaggregation legislation for the Asian and NHPI community in California. Challenges with the bill’s adoption included pressure to narrow the agencies affected by the law and creating an appropriate implementation timeline. Key considerations in the adoption of a state data disaggregation law or policy include educating policymakers about the importance of data disaggregation, determining the scope of the policy, and preparing for implementation.

When returning to their communities after incarceration, individuals face elevated rates of mortality and other poor health outcomes. The reentry period provides a critical opportunity for interventions to improve health, but, historically, a prohibition on federal Medicaid coverage during incarceration has created barriers to care after release. To address these barriers, many states have applied for Medicaid section 1115 reentry waivers to expand access to Medicaid coverage for certain pre- and post-release services. These waivers present an important opportunity to improve care access during reentry, but, if driven by carceral entities, they run the risk of replicating carceral systems that harm health. This article advocates for an alternative approach: centering the perspectives of people with lived experience of incarceration in all aspects of waiver design, implementation, and evaluation. Drawing on personal and professional experience, the authors explore the value of centering lived experience in health policy and identify successes, challenges, and lessons learned from California’s waiver. This article also explores the importance of centering lived experience in information sharing and privacy practices in waiver implementation. Across these areas, waivers driven by lived experience can promote dignity, autonomy, and wellbeing, dismantling carceral approaches that reinforce stigma, erode trust, and perpetuate inequities.

Every US state requires drivers to pass a knowledge and skills examination before obtaining their driver’s license. Surprisingly little is known about the progression of people through the examination process. To date, no research has been conducted on the proportion of individuals who pass from one stage of the driver examination process to the next compared to those who fail and are required to be reexamined. The purpose of this study was to follow the progression of a cohort of new drivers in Washington State as they advanced through the driver examination process. We reviewed driving records for 2,604 teens who started a driver education course in 2024. Of those who attempted the knowledge test at least once, 96 percent passed their knowledge test and 85 percent passed their skills exam. There were significant differences in pass and fail rates by sex, race, and household income. The overwhelming majority of new drivers passed both the knowledge and skills exams after two attempts. The fact that teenagers have a high risk of crashing in the first year of licensure suggests that the full safety potential of the knowledge and skills exams are not being realized.

Employer complaints about rising health care costs have been ubiquitous for a number of years. Survey evidence, though, finds widespread employer shortcomings in the processes they use to select and monitor health plan service providers. The evidence provides a data-driven basis to assess whether employers meet their fiduciary obligations, leading to the conclusion that employers need to increase their diligence or face the possibility of significant liability. The increased diligence may also mitigate health care costs.

Patients experiencing pregnancy complications have died after being denied emergency medical treatment in states with restrictive abortion laws even where the laws ostensibly allow pregnancy termination when necessary to save a patient’s life. For patients experiencing miscarriage, premature rupture of membranes, placental abruption, severe hypertensive disorders, ectopic pregnancy, and other conditions, a treating physician’s decision about whether their condition qualifies as an emergency under state law can mean the difference between life and death. Physicians who treat obstetric emergencies report being torn between delivering evidence-based care and protecting themselves from criminal prosecution. This article frames physician decision-making about emergency abortion within the larger institutional context in which those decisions arise, providing a taxonomy of the myriad hospital policies that impact physicians who treat obstetric emergencies. It evaluates these institutional procedures’ efficacy with respect to the dual goals of protecting pregnant patients’ health and limiting providers’ exposure to legal risk. The article concludes that the optimal institutional approach grants full deference to physicians’ clinical judgment while also providing robust institutional support in the form of comprehensive legal guidance and guaranteed legal representation for physicians who are prosecuted for making good faith medical judgments. It calls upon hospitals to re-commit to their primary mission of providing high quality patient care, and to dedicate resources to supporting physicians who deliver evidence-based care despite unrelenting legal and political pressures.

In their article Objective Standards of Medical Judgment: A Myth of Abortion Law, Graber et al. explore the different legal standards for evaluating if a physician properly offered abortion care under a medical exception to states’ abortion restrictions. While this piece focuses tightly on the use of legal standards to limit access to abortion care, it should be understood in the broader context of a legal and political environment that is increasingly shifting the locus of medical decision-making power from the medical profession to state actors. We agree with Graber et al. that physicians should use their voices to speak out and educate the community on the medical decision-making process. But we are concerned that some state and legal actors are intentionally looking to improperly encroach upon the practice of medicine.

Despite the routine assessment of decisional capacity in the clinical context, the concept of capacity is contested, and its measurement is flawed. For example, scholars and clinicians disagree about the criteria for demonstrating capacity. There is further lack of consensus about whether some types of medical decisions should require more evidence of capacity. Moreover, there is robust literature demonstrating that formal capacity assessment instruments are not always valid and reliable.

This Article focuses on these and other issues, namely the fact that (in)capacity as currently understood is often not viewed relationally and contextually. (In)capacity is viewed as a cognitive property of an individual — an individual has capacity or does not. However, properly conceived, (in)capacity is constituted in interaction with others (e.g., health care providers, family, friends) and one’s environment, and mediated through one’s body and experience of health, illness, or disability. When this reality is not acknowledged, clinicians, caregivers, family members, and others miss opportunities to strengthen patients’ decisional capacity by modifying how they communicate with patients and by changing patients’ environment to improve decision-making. In fact, not acknowledging the relational and contextual nature of (in)capacity likely leads to weakening of patients’ decision-making abilities and the unnecessary disqualification of patients from contemporaneous decision-making, which subsequently negatively affects patient interests in maintaining autonomy and bodily integrity and experiencing wellbeing.

This Article will foreground the relational and contextual nature of (in)capacity and address problems with capacity assessments for adult patients in the medical decision-making context, propose reforms to the capacity assessment process, and conclude by discussing the implications of these arguments in other decision-making contexts.

This essay compares and contrasts the disciplines of sociology and law and society. I then outline how sociology can enrich law and society with stronger theory-building and better linkages of theoretical frameworks to empirical data. I next consider how law and society can enrich sociology, including by encouraging sociologists to take seriously law’s constitutive nature and to engage more directly with their work’s normative implications. Throughout, I draw primarily on research on U.S. immigration enforcement, which is both my area of study and a site of rich cross-pollination between the two fields.