This foreword explores the history of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics and its role in promoting access to care and antiracism.

Law and racism are intertwined, with legal tools bearing the potential to serve as instruments of oppression or equity. This Special Issue explores this dual nature of health law, with attention to policing in the context of mental health, schools, and substance use disorders; industry and the environment in the context of food advertising, tobacco regulation, worker safety, and environmental racism; health care and research in the context of infant mortality, bias in medical applications of AI, and diverse inclusion in research; and anti-racist teaching and practice in the context of building an interprofessional curriculum and medical-legal partnerships.

Preemption is a substantial threat to achieving racial equity. Since 2011, states have increasingly preempted local governments from enacting policies that can improve health and reduce racial inequities such as increasing minimum wage and requiring paid leave.

Involuntary commitment links the healthcare, public health, and legislative systems to act as a “carceral health-service.” While masquerading as more humane and medicalized, such coercive modalities nevertheless further reinforce the systems, structures, practices, and policies of structural oppression and white supremacy. We argue that due to involuntary commitment’s inextricable connection to the carceral system, and a longer history of violent social control, this legal framework cannot and must not be held out as a viable alternative to the criminal legal system responses to behavioral and mental health challenges. Instead, this article proposes true alternatives to incarceration that are centered on liberation that seeks to shrink the carceral system’s grasp on individuals’ and communities’ lives. In this, we draw inspiration from street-level praxis and action theory emanating from grassroots organizations and community organizers across the country under a Public Health Abolition framework.

With growing public health and health equity challenges brought to the forefront — following racialized health inequities resulting from COVID-19 and a national reckoning around the deaths of unarmed Black victims at the hands of police — an antiracist health equity agenda has emerged naming racism a public health crisis.

This article examines the unique disadvantages experienced by Black people and other people of color with substance use disorder in health care, and argues that an intersectional approach to enforcing disability rights laws offer an opportunity to ameliorate some of the harms of oppression to this population.

We propose that marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to Black and Latino consumers results from the intersection of a business model in which profits come primarily from marketing an unhealthy mix of products, standard targeted marketing strategies, and societal forces of structural racism, and contributes to health disparities.

In April 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced its intention to ban menthol flavoring in cigarettes and cigars. The Agency’s decision was based in part on the disproportionate impact of menthol flavoring in Black communities.

An inordinate number of low wage workers in essential industries are Black, Hispanic, or Latino, immigrants or refugees — groups beset by centuries of discrimination and burdened with disproportionate but preventable harms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article aims to show how the changes to NEPA by the Trump Administration are an act of environmental racism, defined as “[i]ntentional or unintentional racial discrimination in environmental policy‐making, enforcement of regulations and laws, and targeting of communities for the disposal of toxic waste and siting of polluting industries.”

This article looks to the past to consider how government officials, health professionals, and legal authorities have historically framed racial disparities in birth and the lasting impact these explanations have had on Black birthing experiences and outcomes.

When applied in the health sector, AI-based applications raise not only ethical but legal and safety concerns, where algorithms trained on data from majority populations can generate less accurate or reliable results for minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations prohibit federally-funded educational institutions and healthcare centers from engaging in disparate impact discrimination “on the ground of race, color, or national origin” in all of their operations.

Legal, medical, and public health professionals have been complicit in creating and maintaining systems that drive health inequities. To ameliorate this, current and future leaders in law, medicine, and public health must learn about racism and its impact along the life course trajectory and how to engage in antiracist practice and health equity work.

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) integrate knowledge and practices from law and health care in pursuit of health equity. However, the MLP movement has not reached its full potential to address racial health inequities, in part because its original framing was not explicitly race conscious.

Dr. Caleb Williams Saleeby was the author of Parenthood and Race Culture, one of the first monographs on eugenics and the book that popularized the term “racial poison.” The goal of eradicating the racial poisons and the harm they caused — particularly infant morbidity and mortality — provided common ground for early 20th century reformers, and their concerns fed the growing support for legal prohibition of alcohol.

Anti-selection occurs when information asymmetry exists between insurers and applicants. When an applicant knows they are at high risk of loss, but the insurer does not, the applicant may try to use this knowledge differential to secure insurance at a lower premium that does not match risk.

This commentary proposes the need for greater normative debate about when, if ever, it is appropriate for insurers to access genetic information of insureds to combat anti-selection.

Attorneys regularly prepare advance healthcare directives for their clients. However, attorneys, lacking medical knowledge, are often considered ill-equipped to prepare such documents. While recognizing and respecting the fact that advance healthcare directives pertain to decisions about medical care, this article proposes that attorneys who prepare advance healthcare directives nevertheless provide a valuable service.