For more than a century, US courts generally deferred to public health authorities, recognizing their expertise and the necessity of swift, science-based action to protect population health. This deference supported legal interventions that substantially increased life expectancy, reduced morbidity, and advanced health equity. In recent years, however, courts — particularly the Supreme Court — have retreated from this approach. Specifically, Supreme Court–driven doctrinal shifts favoring free exercise challenges, limiting deference to administrative agencies, and undermining equal protection have eroded public health authority and constrained governments’ capacity to protect health and improve equity. Drawing on an empirical review of 30 lawsuits filed between January 2024 and May 2025 challenging governmental and institutional health equity initiatives, the paper demonstrates that the majority of these cases resulted in the invalidation or abandonment of equity-focused policies. These findings illustrate how contemporary judicial rulings are limiting governments’ and institutions’ authority and ability to safeguard health, particularly the health of our most vulnerable and marginalized populations. The paper concludes with a call to action: a coordinated public health strategy to build and sustain a jurisprudence that supports the fair, effective, and evidence-based exercise of public health authority.

The use of AvertD, a genetic test to assess an individual’s risk of developing opioid use disorder, will expose physicians to liability. Critics of the test argue that the test itself is unreliable, often resulting in false positives, which will lead to potential undertreatment of pain, and false negatives, which will lead to inappropriate opioid prescriptions. But if the test is available, physicians will use it. And often, due to a combination of genetic determinism and genetic illiteracy, physicians will rely on the test to make opioid prescription decisions without also looking to the environmental, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and other factors that contribute to an individual’s opioid use disorder risk.

Genetic test results that purport to predict opioid use disorder — or really, any behavioral or psychiatric trait or diagnosis — may have enormous consequences for individual lives. When patients are harmed by physicians’ negligent clinical decision making, they can often turn to tort law for a remedy. This article covers various physician liability scenarios, from inappropriate prescribing based on genetic test results to failure to test and informed consent issues. Physicians could face liability for prescribing opioids after a positive test result, or for denying pain medication due to false positive test results, or for prescribing opioids to patients despite negative results that prove false, or for failing to administer the test at all. This article concludes that existing tort frameworks offer insufficient protection for patients and fail to ensure appropriate integration of these tests into clinical practice. And relying on tort law will not mitigate the individual and societal harms raised by the introduction of a polygenic risk score test for opioid use disorder.

Frank Knight’s work is examined through the lens provided by the posthumous publication of his essay “Economic History” in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas in 1973. Knight identified pivotal ideas in economics from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations until the time of his retirement from the University of Chicago, with some recognition of earlier contributions. The priority he gave to liberty within economics shows in the connection between Adam Smith and American independence. He then worked his way chronologically through a consideration of eight “moments” from classical economics, almost all declared errors. After identifying marginalism with the turn to economic science in three moments, he identified fifteen more moments that led to the development of a science focused on entrepreneurs and enterprises. Knight’s conclusion provides brief mention of six movements that claimed to conflict with economics, although Knight argued that none of them actually conflict.

Les documents produits par l’Église catholique pour traiter un « abus » du sacré n’ont pas les violences sexuelles pour objet. Ainsi, les dossiers de l’Inquisition pour « sollicitation » poursuivent l’abus de la confession : le confesseur qui incite une personne à des « actes honteux » (sexuels) abuse du sacrement, non d’une personne. Or, avant les témoignages récents des personnes victimes, l’histoire des violences repose sur ces traces indirectes des faits. Le passage de l’abus à la violence, souvent rapide, manque d’une méthode partagée. Dans cet article, je propose trois critères pour identifier les violences sexuelles commises par des clercs dans des dossiers pour sollicitation : le non-consentement, la dépendance oppressive au confesseur, qui force la résignation aux actes sexuels, et la reconnaissance par l’entourage. Ces critères, appliqués aux 191 procédures pour sollicitation devant l’Office de Modène, entre 1605 et 1727, et à 360 relations de direction spirituelle, permettent d’attester 121 cas de violences sexuelles autour de la confession. Je porte enfin un nouveau regard sur la médiation, méconnue quand un clerc est auteur de violences. Un arrangement advenu en 1717 est étudié pour comprendre comment le silence se fait, en famille et dans l’Église, après le viol répété d’une jeune femme par son curé. Les outils présentés visent à lancer des recherches coordonnées, pouvant s’appliquer à tous les contextes méditerranéens et impériaux où l’Inquisition a juridiction.

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.