Law Schools are now required to provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism under ABA Standard 303(c). Law clinics, with their social justice orientation, have long taught about structural causes of bias and oppression and ways to intervene at system levels to prevent problems. Medical legal partnership (MLP) clinics have done so by employing concepts from social work and health science programs on structural competency. This article examines MLP and related curriculum to meet the ABA mandate.

Charity Scott brought health law to Georgia State College of Law in the fall of 1987. Through her faculty appointment, along with her boundless energy and intellectual curiosity, she set herself on an odyssey. She began by teaching a single general health law class. This beginning led to the development of a full curriculum in the field, complete with experiential learning opportunities and a certificate in health law program. In addition to creating learning and career opportunities in health law for law students, her development of the Center for Health, Law and Society created academic opportunities for leading health law faculty.

Medical legal partnerships address individual legal needs that can create impediments to health. Little is known about outcomes from medical legal partnerships and their relationship to access to justice. This paper reports outcomes from one medical legal partnership from the perspective of the client, with specific emphasis on impact on health and concepts related to access to justice. We suggest a conceptual model for incorporating medical legal partnerships into a broader framework about access to justice.

While Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) have improved the health and well-being of the people they serve, most healthcare institutions will only invest in an MLP if they are convinced that doing so will improve its balance sheet. This article offers a detailed estimation of the cost savings that an MLP targeted toward the most acute legal needs would accrue to an academic medical center (AMC) in North Carolina.

The social ecological model (SEM) is a conceptual framework that recognizes individuals function within multiple interactive systems and contextual environments that influence their health. Medical Legal Partnerships (MLPs) address the social determinants of health through partnerships between health providers and civil legal services. This paper explores how the conceptual framework of SEM can be applied to the MLP model, which also uses a multidimensional approach to address an individual’s social determinants of health.