Private Wealth and Public Health: A Critique of Richard Epstein's Defense of the 'Old' Public Health

This article is a response to Richard Epstein's recent legal and economic critiques of contemporary public health law. The power of Epstein's critical position stems from the convergence of three problems, each with distinctive intellectual histories: (1) an age-old debate within political...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Perspectives in biology and medicine 2003-06, Vol.46 (3), p.S176-S198, Article S176
Main Author: Novak, William J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bioethics
Coercion
Evaluation Studies as Topic
Forecasting
Freedom
Government Regulation
Health care policy
Health Care Reform
History
History, 19th Century
History, 20th Century
Humans
Politics
Private Sector
Public health
Public Health - economics
Public Health - history
Public Health - standards
Public Health - trends
Public Policy
Social Class
Social impact
Social Justice
United States
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Summary:This article is a response to Richard Epstein's recent legal and economic critiques of contemporary public health law. The power of Epstein's critical position stems from the convergence of three problems, each with distinctive intellectual histories: (1) an age-old debate within political liberalism about the proper relationship of individual right and state power; (2) a somewhat more recent biomedical policy contest over the necessary scale and scope of public health interventions in modern societies; and (3) an ongoing legal-jurisprudential argument about the overall trajectory and implications of American constitutional history. My critique of Epstein's position follows this same tripartite format, moving from an initial discussion of the history of liberalism to the history of public health and, finally, to a critique of Epstein's general legal history of state regulation in America.
ISSN:0031-5982
1529-8795
1529-8795
DOI:10.1353/pbm.2003.0057