Courses

The cornerstone of the GHJP is a practicum/clinic course: the Health Justice Practicum. This course fuses didactic and experiential learning on critical topics at the intersection of public health, rights, and justice in the twenty-first century. Students from law, public health, and other disciplines work in teams on projects, typically with outside partners, to address key mediators of health, with particular focus on health equity and commitment to addressing the fundamental social causes of disease. It also emphasizes power-building and political economy, instead of viewing health as a technocratic field where issues are resolved through application of expertise alone. Project approaches and readings draw from legal, public health, historical, anthropological, and other fields to introduce students to the multiple lenses through which health issues can be tackled, and to build their competence to work with colleagues in other disciplines around such interventions. A central goal of the clinic is to equip students with the capacity to engage critically and constructively with the evolving tools of law, policy, and rights in the context of health and human rights. 

The Health Justice Practicum (2 or 3 credits for YLS students; 1 credit generally for YSPH) is open to both new and continuing students and is primarily focused on experiential project work. While there is not a weekly didactic seminar, students will participate in onboarding sessions at the start of the semester; regular project-oriented sessions throughout the semester to discuss updates, key themes, and opportunities for inter-team collaboration; and weekly team supervision meetings.

Our projects evolve each semester according to our partners’ interests and needs, as well as in response to changes at local, state, national and international levels in policies and programs affecting partners, relevant movements and key populations. See selected current and past Practicum projects below.

For more information on the Practicum and application instructions, consult the course listings for your school.

A Health Justice Seminar is offered in the Spring. It is designed as an accompaniment to the Health Justice Practicum, but students are not required to enroll in the Practicum. 

Note that law students seeking experiential credit must be enrolled simultaneously in the Practicum and a seminar course offered by the GHJP.

Health Justice: Theory to Practice, Spring 2021 

This course was offered in Spring 2021 as a theoretical and experiential course with a distinctive structure. The first half of the course provided an intensive introduction to the social, economic, political, and legal determinants of health, developed through readings and classroom discussion. The seminar focused on the politics of care and COVID-19 in the U.S and used a health justice lens to explore the historical structures and policy choices that have shaped the pandemic. The course evaluated the role of race, class, and gender in structuring vulnerability and explored the ability of technical versus power-building approaches to advance health justice and health equity. In the second half of the course, students worked in teams to put their learning into practice.
 
Health Justice: Politics of Care, Spring 2022 

This course was offered in Spring 2022 and explored questions of health justice, with a focus on how care is marginalized in our existing political economy and on what a new "politics of care" might require and enable. The course provided an intensive introduction to the social, economic, political, and legal determinants of health, and also to literature on social reproduction and care work. Students explored the historical structures and policy choices that have shaped health equity, primarily in the U.S. Students in the course had the opportunity to evaluate the role of race, class, and gender in structuring vulnerability and explore the ability of technical versus power-building approaches to advance health justice and a politics of care.