LawAtlas.org provides access to high-quality information about the contents and characteristics of laws and policies of public health importance.

Governments and other institutions use laws, policies, statutes, and regulations in many ways to influence behaviors and environments. Understanding the details and nuances of those rules and regulations helps us better understand how they can support and influence health or well-being, or foster systems of inequity or illness.

The legal data on LawAtlas.org are produced by expert staff at the Center for Public Health Law Research (CPHLR) at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, as well as a worldwide network of collaborators and partners, using scientific legal mapping methods like policy surveillance.

The data support a broad ecosystem of research, advocacy, policymaking, and public health and public health law practice. Data on LawAtlas.org have been cited by media and in scholarly work more than 250 times since 2014.

Legal Dataset Topics

LawAtlas.org is home to legal datasets that capture laws and policies at all levels of government in more than 20 topical areas. Among the more than 150 datasets, the site includes the largest repository of legal data on US state abortion law, as well as all the drug policy datasets originally housed at PDAPS.org.

LawAtlas.org is supported by funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to increase the use of high-quality information about the law and its relationship to health. Data on the site have been created with support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Arnold Foundation, Trust for America’s Health, the Hopewell Fund, National League of Cities, and others.

LawAtlas.org is powered by MonQcle, a one-stop-shop legal research software developed by CPHLR to navigate and organize complex legal text to produce legal data that may be used in research and practice.

Scientific Legal Mapping for Research and Practice

The legal data visualized in the maps and tables on LawAtlas.org are built using scientific legal mapping research methods, primarily policy surveillance.

Policy surveillance is the is the systematic, scientific collection and analysis of laws of public health significance.

Policy surveillance creates data that may be used in research and in practice because of its high degree of rigor and quality control. There is legal information on LawAtlas.org created using other types of scientific legal mapping, like sentinel surveillance, that may support a preliminary understanding of an emerging area of law, or serve as a starting point for future policy surveillance. Datasets on LawAtlas.org may be cross-sectional, capturing the law as it was at one point in time, or they may be longitudinal, capturing the state of the law at multiple points in time. They capture laws and policies at all levels — international law, US federal policies (like Medicaid), US state and territorial law, city or county-level laws, even hospital policies.