Innovative “Medical-Legal Collaborative” with Brown Medical School on the National Stage

Liz Tobin Tyler, our Director of Public Service and Community Partnerships, is taking the lead in developing a distinctive collaboration between RWU Law and Brown Medical School.  The “Medical-Legal Collaborative” involves faculty from both institutions, team-teaching students from both institutions, how to provide holistic help to poor individuals and families, on the view that many poor people’s health problems are exacerbated, if not caused, by living in poverty.

Liz has been spreading the word outside of Rhode Island as well: she presented at a Health Law conference at Widener Law School, teaching a mock class addressing the issues raised in childhood lead poisoning and warranty of habitability cases, and discussed interdisciplinary teaching at the Medical-Legal Partnership Summit and the ABA Equal Justice Conference. In July, she will present the therapeutic implications of interdisciplinary collaboration at the annual meeting of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health in New York

Her article, “Allies Not Adversaries: Teaching Collaboration to the Next Generation of Doctors and Lawyers to Address Social Inequality,” was published late last year in the Journal of Health Care Law and Policy, and she is hard at work co-authoring a casebook, Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership, with Barry Zuckerman, M.D. (the founder of the National Medical Legal Partnership and Professor at Boston), Megan Sandel, M.D., and Ellen Lawton, J.D., both of the National Medical Legal Partnership.  Liz will finish her busy year with a presentation of her work on Medical-Legal curriculum development in September at a conference on “Interdisciplinary Clinical Education: Partnerships between Law Schools and the Health Professions” in Atlanta.

Keep up the great work, Liz!