Richards EP, Rathbun KC. Making state public health laws work for SARS outbreaks. Emerg Infect Dis Feb 2004. Original link: URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no2/03-0836.htm (Companion CDC article)
This article was written in 1989 to refute the idea that traditional public health laws had been implicitly repealed by the Warren Court. The thesis is developed through an analysis of then current United State Supreme Court decisions involving the control of dangerous persons, including criminal law decisions. While the article does not endorse the use of public health law powers in the criminal law context, the Supreme Court's willingness to do so clearly implies that it believes that the traditional public health law decisions are still good precedent. Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997), decided well after the publication of this article, follows the rationale of the criminal law cases analyzed in the article and applies traditional public health principles to the detention of sexual predators.
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