PROFESSOR MAKHLOUF TO PRESENT AT SYMPOSIUM ON HEALTH LAW AND ANTI-RACISM
February 2022 — On March 30, 2022, Professor Medha Makhlouf will present her paper on the role of medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in advancing racial justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Research presented at the symposium, titled “Health Law and Anti-Racism: Reckoning and Response,” will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics in spring 2022.
The purpose of the special issue and symposium is to “explore the dual nature of health law and its connection to racial justice — both from a systemic and interpersonal perspective.” Professor Makhlouf’s contribution, “Towards Racial Justice: The Role of Medical-Legal Partnerships,” argues that the MLP movement has not reached its full potential to address racial health inequities, in part because its original framing was not explicitly race conscious. It concludes with a call to action for MLPs to name racism as a social determinant of health and to examine how racism may operate in the field. It creates a foundation for future work on operationalizing racial justice in the MLP model, research, and practice. The article builds on a blog post that Professor Makhlouf published in September 2020, for a digital symposium on understanding the role of race in health. The post, “Addressing Racism through Medical-Legal Partnerships,” is available here.
Professor Makhlouf will present her research on a panel titled Anti-Racist Teaching and Practice. The other panels will focus on Health Law and Policing, Industry and the Environment, and Health Care and Research. The Guest Editors for the special issue and organizers of the symposium are Professors Michele Goodwin of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Holly Fernandez Lynch of the Perelmen School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
The symposium is free and open to the public, and registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. An event flyer, a draft agenda, and COVID safety protocols for in-person attendees are posted online.
Professor Medha D. Makhlouf is an Assistant Professor and Founding Director of the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic at Penn State Dickinson Law. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Penn State College of Medicine. Professor Makhlouf’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of health law, immigrants’ rights, and poverty law and policy. Her recent scholarship has been published in the New York University Law Review, the California Law Review Online, and the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics. Professor Makhlouf’s work is available at https://works.bepress.com/medha-makhlouf/.