Master of Public Health Opportunities for Lawyers
The Harvard School of Public Health offers a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program
with a formal concentration in Law and Public Health. The program is
open to those who have already completed the JD degree and wish to
obtain training in public health. The MPH is completed in two semesters
of full-time study or two to three years of part-time study.
HSPH and Harvard Law School
also offer a joint JD/MPH degree program. This program is appropriate
for incoming or first-year Harvard law students who who desire to
pursue an integrated curriculum in law and public health as preparation
for a career in health law, health policy, or public health practice.
Click on the link at left for more information.
Curriculum
The goal of the LPH curriculum is to give lawyers training in a
range of areas within public health. Students devote a significant
amount of time to the acquisition of quantitative methodological
skills, including biostatistics and epidemiology. Through the core
curriculum, they also acquire basic knowledge about major substantive
areas within public health, including health services administration
and policy, environmental and occupational health, health and social
behavior, and ethics. Students are able to choose elective courses from
among a wide array of offerings at the School of Public Health, as well
as the Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, other Harvard
graduate schools, MIT, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at
Tufts University.
A common misperception among prospective
applicants is that the LPH program provides lawyers with specialized
training in health law. Although health law courses are offered at HSPH
and students may also take classes at the Law School, the LPH program
does not aim to offer the kind of specialized legal training that might
be found in graduate study at a law school. Rather, the purpose of the
program is to train lawyers in a different field: public health. A
typical LPH student chooses one or two electives in health law, but
takes three or more courses in quantitative methods such as
biostatistics, epidemiology, and decision analysis, as well as a range
of policy courses and other courses.
The LPH program is also not
a "law and medicine" program. Lawyers will be trained in public health
sciences, which focus on population health rather than the
physician-patient relationship; and on a broad array of health
interventions aside from clinical therapies. Ethics, too, is taught
from a public health rather than a clinical ethics perspective.
Core requirements
About
half of an LPH student's course credits consist of core requirements.
Students must take a full semester course in Biostatistics, as well as
a half-semester course in each of the following five areas: Ethics,
Epidemiology, Health Services Administration, Health and Social
Behavior, and Environmental Health. For most of these core areas,
several different courses are offered to satisfy the requirement.
In
addition to these courses, all LPH students must take at least one
health law course. In the spring semester, all MPH students complete a
field internship called the Practicum. Click on the link at left for
more information about the Practicum.
It is important
that applicants understand that much of their time at HSPH will be
spent on core courses. LPH concentrators often find the quantitative
methods classes challenging and time-consuming. A commitment to
acquiring the basic public health skills taught in the core courses is
an important quality in a prospective applicant.
For more detailed information about MPH requirements, see the MPH Handbook.
Elective offerings
In
addition to the core requirements, LPH students typically take 18 to 20
elective credits (with a typical half-semester course counting for 2.5
credits). Substantial freedom is permitted in the choice of electives.
Zuckerman Fellows Program
Law and Public Health concentrators in the MPH program, including
JD/MPH joint degree candidates, are eligible to apply to the Zuckerman
Fellows Program. This University-wide program provides one full year of
tuition and fees at the School of Public Health, plus a stipend of
$30,000. Details and application procedures are described
here.