This tribute compares Charity Scott to Fred Rogers, highlighting how Charity nurtured health law colleagues’ unique gifts and built community. Continuing the neighborhood theme, it highlights encouraging developments relating to health, housing, and place: Medicaid housing supports and potential reparations for redlining-related health inequities.

In 2006, the University of Maryland Carey School of Law had the privilege of co-hosting the annual Health Law Professors Conference with the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME). Coincidentally, as director of the Law & Health Care Program at Maryland, I had the opportunity to announce the winner of the Jay Healey Health Law Teachers’ Award at the conference. The award is given to “professors who have devoted a significant portion of their career to health law teaching and whose selection would honor Jay [Healey’s] legacy through their passion for teaching health law, their mentoring of students and/or other faculty and by their being an inspiration to colleagues and students.”1 Healey, a Professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, was the youngest recipient of the Society’s Health Law Teachers’ Award, which he received in 1990. He was passionate about teaching and had the idea to devote a session each year at the annual conference to teaching health law. It was always a plenary session at which he challenged us to be better teachers. Jay died in 1993, at the age of 46, not long after the Health Law Teachers conference that year, which he attended and which also happened to be held in Baltimore at the University of Maryland School of Law. Thereafter, the award was given in his name.

Charity Scott was a professor of health law at Georgia State University College of Law, the founding director of the College of Law’s Center for Law, Health, and Society, and co-founder of the Health Law Partnership (HeLP) at Georgia State. She is an iconic figure in her adopted hometown of Atlanta and certainly one of the most important scholars in the history of the health law field, justly celebrated for her teaching, her innovation, her commitment to interdisciplinary work, and for her compassion and love for others. She was also a dear friend of mine. In this short essay I will reflect on my friendship with Charity and her involvement with the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the publisher of this journal.

This is how Georgia State University College of Law Professor Charity Scott introduced the concept of mindfulness to numerous law students and lawyers. Aware that her skeptical, mind-driven audience needed a clear definition for a practice that seemed curious, at best, and esoteric, at worst, she immediately gave us the very lawyerly task of “pars[ing] each of these phrases to understand their importance and relevance to the legal profession”2 and applying them to our own experience of studying or practicing law. Using scientific evidence, she described the benefits of mindfulness and then invited us to try it and decide for ourselves. Charity was a superb teacher, who knew how to impart knowledge skillfully, and a brilliant lawyer, who could present and defend her case exceptionally well. In fact, “Charity Scott owned the subject matter so deeply that she was able to engage lawyers who otherwise would never have given the concept of mindfulness any credence in a million years. In a way that’s hard to describe, she didn’t brook any resistance on the topic and, as a result, was able to move the needle on well-being for lawyers at a time when, as far as I can tell, she was the only one doing the lifting,” reflects Lynn Garson, health care attorney and mental health advocate. But I believe Charity Scott’s true mastery and impact came from her embodiment of mindfulness itself. In her presence, mindfulness ceased to be a mere concept, but instead became her way of being that illuminated her words and actions, nourished her relationships, and changed lives.

It was a great privilege to know Professor Charity Scott. I first met her when I was finishing Emory University’s joint law and public health program in the early 2000s, through the Office of General Counsel at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in the early days of CDC’s Public Health Law Program, now the Office of Public Health Law Services. In those days, introductions were generous and frequent for excited students beginning their careers, but meeting Professor Scott made an impression on me. She was the first and only female health law professor in the field that I had the opportunity to know in the early years of my career.

This special edition of JLME celebrates the life of Charity Scott, Professor Emerita and Founding Director of the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University College of Law.