Reimagining Law and Policy for the 100-Year Life

Over the last 75 years, public health innovations, medical advancements, and improved living standards helped increase life expectancy in the United States from an average of 60–70 years towards the “100-year life”—with the number of centenarians expected to more than quadruple by 2054. 

Anne L. Alstott ’87, Abbe R. Gluck ’00, and Eugene Rusyn ’17 anticipate the major transformations this demographic shift will have throughout society in their co-edited volume, “Law and the 100-Year Life: Transforming Our Institutions for a Longer Lifespan.” The book gathers nearly three dozen leading legal experts across a wide range of fields for an interdisciplinary exploration of how law will be influenced by and need to adapt to this new longevity.

Core institutions touching nearly every aspect of life will be impacted by Americans living longer. Challenges already include accommodating new family structures, aging-friendly housing, and employment arrangements, as well as addressing age-related inequalities in education, retirement, health care and caregiving, immigration, and criminal justice. “Law and the 100-Year Life” diagnoses how current frameworks fall short of these growing societal needs, warns of the potential for worsening disparities and discrimination, and proposes policy reforms for ensuring greater opportunity and quality of life. 

“Law, thus broadly conceived,” the authors write, “has an essential role to play in who will age, how they age, where they age, and more. The chapters in this book are meant to provoke creative and ambitious thinking about the law’s potential as a tool, rather than an obstacle, to a better 100-year-life.” The contributors set the stage for academics, policymakers, and practitioners to tackle the sweeping challenges associated with more Americans living longer than ever before.

The volume is co-edited by Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation Anne L. Alstott ’87, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law Abbe R. Gluck ’00, and Eugene Rusyn ’17, associate research scholar at the Law School’s Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. The book’s 28 contributors include Law School faculty members Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law Douglas Kysar, Augustus E. Lines Professor of Law John Morley ’06, and Professor of Law Taisu Zhang ’08. Several Law School alumni also contributed chapters, including Professors Kate Andrias ’04, Eleanor Brown ’99, Cynthia Estlund ’83, Jamal Greene ’05, Sara Sternberg Greene ’05, Daniel Hemel ’12, Noah Kazis ’15, Lior Strahilevitz ’99, and Kenji Yoshino ’96.

Alstott is Jacquin D. Bierman Professor at Yale Law School. She also holds a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine as Professor at the Yale Child Study Center and is a Faculty Affiliate at the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies. She is the author of several books, including “The Public Option” (with Ganesh Sitaraman, 2019) and “A New Deal for Old Age” (2016).

Gluck is Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and founding Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School. She is also Professor of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and founding director of The Adrienne Drell ’92 MSL and Franklin Nitikman ’66 LLB Elder Law Project at Yale Law School. She founded and still directs the Yale Law School Medical Legal Partnership Program, a legal services clinic that spans eight diverse sites and populations in New Haven.

Eugene Rusyn ’17 is an associate research scholar and Senior Academic Fellow at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School. His research interests include health law, environmental law, legal history, and the study of government bureaucracy. He is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Palliative Care Law and Policy GPS, a first-of-its-kind research platform, at Yale Law School.