The American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics is an organization with, as the saying goes, many irons in the fire. Not only do we publish two acclaimed journals, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics and the American Journal of Law & Medicine, but we also sponsor and host numerous national conferences every year. Aside from our annual flagship meeting, the Health Law Professors Conference, ASLME meetings can cover everything from health care reform to conflicts of interest in medicine to the study of DNA forensics. This ability to multitask also pays great dividends for our members. It allows us to combine our expertise in convening meetings with the power of publishing in globally-recognized journals, thus disseminating the ideas brought forth at these gatherings to an incredibly large and diverse audience.
The two issues of JLME that we have just published support these bold claims. First, in our regular issue, we are proud to publish the papers from the symposium “Reimagining Human Subject Protection for the 21st Century: A Critical Assessment of The Revised Common Rule.” This all-day symposium was held at Seton Hall University School of Law in November 2018, and was co-sponsored by ASLME. Our host that day and the guest-editor of the papers that are collected here is our longtime friend Carl H. Coleman of Seton Hall. Carl gathers together a stellar cast of thinkers and scholars to critically assess the revisions to the Common Rule enacted in 2017, and to map a way forward through this complex and important new landscape. By asking tough, thoughtful questions about the revision process, Carl and his authors make full use of the dual conference and publishing opportunity. The authors' ideas and concepts are first shared and tested at the meeting, then after a rigorous revision process they are published in JLME. We are very proud to be the home of such important work.
A similar process was used to produce the latest in what has been one of our longest-lasting collaborations; the special supplement volume collecting the papers from the 2018 Public Health and the Law Conference, held in October 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona and cosponsored by ASLME. This supplement, the 10th that has published the papers that have come out of the Public Health and the Law Conference in one form or another, was produced in partnership with the Network for Public Health Law and was guest-edited by our great friend Donna Levin of the Network. The title of the conference and the accompanying supplement, “Health Justice — Empowering Public Health and Advancing Health Equity,” explains the noble goal of this two-tier endeavor; to promote health equity through empowerment. It is a goal we at ASLME share, and it is why we are so proud to publish both of these issues of JLME.
