Professor Sugarman's Contribution to Public Health Scholarship

Abstract

I first met Steve Sugarman at an annual meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), probably in the early 1990s. As a teacher of torts, among other things, I had of course read some of his often seminal, always bracing torts scholarship-especially his iconoclastic, pathbreaking book Doing Away with Personal Injury Law (1989).' There, he went far beyond existing no-fault thinking and other incremental tort system reform proposals to urge a far greater reliance on regulatory and entitlement programs, which he would expand and refine. This theme-greater reliance on government entitlements-has been a constant in the immense Sugarman oeuvre. Sure enough, at the APPAM session where we met as joint panelists, Sugarman was at it again-with a paper explaining how workers could be better protected through a plan for regulatory entitlements, some contributory, which would maximize workers' benefits, flexibility, and protection against workplace interruptions. Attention to justice in the workplace has been another significant motif in Sugarman's work, albeit not one that I explore here. Like all of Sugarman's policy proposals, the worker-benefit scheme cleverly exploited the resources, interstices, and limitations of government and market arrangements to improve social welfare and fairness to individuals. Interestingly, for all his policy boldness, he has never been a pie-in-the-sky, start-from-scratch reformer. Instead, Sugarman begins with existing arrangements and institutions. He then assesses their strengths and weaknesses and proposes policy changes that seem only incremental but might move the ball way down the field (to use a tired sports cliche that even the indefatigable Sugarman surely deployed when he taught sports law).

The organizers of this Festschrift asked me to discuss Sugarman's work in the area of public health. It is a pleasure to do so. It is also a valuable relearning experience, given his major contributions to this literally life-and-death field, a field that the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated to its proper place in the policy universe. Before getting into Sugarman-on-public-health proper, I note that almost all of his work, even when not denominated as focused on public health, bears closely on it. One example, to which I've already referred, is workers' rights. Another policy area that bears closely on public health-the education of children who grow up in and around poverty had been of special concern to Sugarman from the beginning of his academic career a half century ago. As his and others' work has shown, the quality of poor children's educational experience (in terms of teaching, textbooks, other resources, and classroom discipline) and the quantity of their education (affected by dropout rates, illness, truancy, suspension, and expulsion) affect their health, with the causality going in both directions.

More recently, Sugarman's scholarship has focused on public health per se, especially his extensive work on how to combat the public health scourges of obesity, tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy foods. This work-a deeply felt preoccupation, really-began well over a decade ago. The remainder of my contribution will focus on it.