Good Legal Authority for Public Health: An Implementation Roadmap
Purpose and Goals of a Forthcoming Resource from ChangeLab Solutions and Act for Public Health
Act for Public Health envisions a public health system that effectively and equitably serves the public’s health. In our research, we’ve identified ways that public health practitioners’ foundational legal authority can be a tool to promote processes, accountability measures, and shared goals to realize this vision.
We believe that the laws and policies that establish public health authority should require and facilitate the following key public health activities:
- Decision-making processes that center community priorities, cross-sector partnerships, and public health workforce supports — all of which are essential for successful implementation
- Accountability practices that use data and evaluation to produce timely, comprehensive, and transformative assessments
- Setting shared goals to ensure foundational public health services for all, with the ability to act on the growing evidence for structural interventions that address upstream drivers of health inequity
Good legal authority for public health activities and decision making will look different across the United States, but no community is starting from scratch. Our work to categorize and name examples of good legal authority, at its heart, aims to translate policy wins into new contexts, inspire innovation, and mitigate and prevent policy harms.
We are currently working with a wide range of contributors and reviewers to produce an implementation roadmap that provides examples of legal authority measures that establish these priorities. We include research describing the evidence base for each, as well as implementation tools from key organizational and institutional experts. The following table outlines our current research structure and provides links to foundational resources in each section.
| Process | Accountability | Goals | |
| Public Health Core Services | Sustainability and workforce supports | Data tools | Foundational public health services for all |
| Public Health Centering Community | Community trust | Community accountability | Community-based determinants of health |
| Public Health Within Systemic Change | Cross-sector partnerships | Integrity of impact data over time | Undoing drivers of health inequity |
Process and Timeline Through June 2025
Act for Public Health’s work on this roadmap is driven by our tracking of legislation and litigation since 2020, which found trends in limiting public health authority that go back decades. Our efforts for 2023–2025 include legal and policy research; partner and practitioner conversations; drafting, review, and dissemination of findings; and coordination with communities across the United States.
We seek to support our partners in public health and other disciplines who are working to address social and political determinants of health — for example, national, regional, and state organizations (including advocacy and power-building organizations); communities of practice; state and local public health, legal, and policy practitioners; and officials and authorizing decision makers.
Please reach out to Sara Bartel at sbartel@changelabsolutions.org to provide examples and observations related to good public health authority.
Join the Act for Public Health mailing list, and use this QR code to access a short survey about good legal authority for public health.