Health law is an incredibly broad, diverse and dynamic field of law. Health lawyers work on cases and policy relating to access to care, insurance coverage, difficult ethical choices (particularly at the beginning and end of life), providers of care (and how these providers are organized and paid), the safety of our drugs and food supply, disease prevention and treatment, and many other fascinating topics. In part because of the breadth of the field, health law also cuts across and involves doctrine and practice from a wide array of areas, including contract law, tax law, corporations and nonprofit organization, insurance and pension law,
employment and labor law, public benefits law, torts, ethics, criminal law, administrative law,
privacy, civil rights, reproductive rights, constitutional law, and statutory drafting and
interpretation—even First Amendment religious liberty and freedom of speech concepts can be
implicated in the field of health law. And health law is practiced in a dizzying range of settings: in federal, state and local government; in legal services organizations; in advocacy nonprofits; and in private public interest law firms, to namea few. Students and alumni attracted to health law as a career path can choose among many different types of legal practice, from direct client services to agency counsel or in-house
work to policy work. These multiple diversities make health law a field where almost anyone
can find an area of interest, and where those working within the field can often find new
challenges.
