Welcome to my website! I am associate professor and Dean of Faculty at Emory Law. I study the interaction of law with health care and public health, focusing on framework administrative, constitutional, and fiscal laws that influence health (and especially addiction) outcomes by structuring health policy choices. I teach courses in related subjects, including Budget Policy, Health Care Finance, and Legislation & Regulation.
My goal is to increase our knowledge base about changes in framework laws that might reduce health harms in general and addiction harms in particular. For example, in Covid-19 Reveals the Fiscal Determinants of Health, I traced coronavirus policy failures to their upstream fiscal law drivers in the federal budget process. And in Public Health Law’s Digital Frontier: Addictive Design, Section 230, and the First Amendment, I described the interaction of the First Amendment and Section 230 with state and federal efforts to regulate addictive design by technology companies. My work is necessarily trans-disciplinary. In medical and public health parlance, I study law as a structural determinant of health. In public law parlance, I study the substantive and distributive impacts of ostensibly neutral framework laws.
My work has been published in leading law reviews including those at Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, and NYU. I am also a co-author of The Law of American Health Care (3rd Ed.). In addition to law reviews, I seek out ways to share my knowledge through peer reviewed journals and media, and I have been privileged to do so through federal government service as senior advisor to the DEA (Biden Administration), special advisor to the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee (majority democrats), associate attorney and intermittent consultant at the White House Office of Management & Budget (Trump Administration), and trial attorney at the Department of Justice’s Federal Programs Branch (Obama Administration).
This site collects my scholarship, CV, and other relevant materials. If you are a student interested in working with me, a researcher interested in collaborating, or a journalist or policymaker interested in my perspective, please do not hesitate to email me at matthew.lawrence@emory.edu.
My CV is available here.