LawAtlas Success Stories:
  • Kelly Thompson, Esq.
    Health Policy Expert
  • Laura Thomas, MPH, MPP
    Deputy State Director, California, of the Drug Policy Alliance
  • Alessandra Ross, MPH
    Injection Drug Use Specialist
  • Bryce Pardo, PhD
    Associate Director, Drug Policy Research Center; Policy Researcher
  • Benjamin Mason Meier, JD, LLM, PhD
    Professor of global health policy in the Dept. of Public Policy and the Dept. of Health Policy and Mgmt. at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
  • Darrell Klein, JD
    Deputy Director of Public Health Nebraska DHHS at State of Nebraska
  • Manel Kappagoda, JD, MPH
    Program Director and Senior Staff Attorney ChangeLab Solutions Oakland, CA
  • Emalie Huriaux, MPH
    Integration, Hepatitis C, and Drug User Health Program Manager for the Washington State Department of Health
  • Rachel Hulkower, JD, MSPH
    Public Health Analyst at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  • Micah Berman, JD
    Associate professor of public health and law at The Ohio State University's College of Public Health and Michael E. Moritz College of Law
  • Maya Doe-Simkins, MPH
    Public health educator, researcher and consultant
  • Nabarun Dasgupta, MPH, PhD
    Epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
    • LawAtlas Success Stories:

    User Success Stories

    Click a name below to view their story, or browse all stories to the right.

    Associate Director, Drug Policy Research Center; Policy Researcher
    "It was good to have legal scholars and legally-minded people who presented the information as data so I could work with it to run regressions to understand the law’s impact. Not having to compile the data myself freed up my ability to develop measurements and do the analysis, and reduced coding errors I may have introduced because of my lack of legal knowledge."

    Bryce’s story:

    In 2014, I was looking for data related to prescription drug monitoring programs to identify ways of evaluating their impact because up to that point, any research had been largely inconclusive. I wanted to know what comprised PDMPs in different states. I’m not a lawyer, so when I was looking for legal information, LawAtlas data was really the only data that existed that I could use in my research.

    I do not have a legal background, and while I could learn, that’s a lot of time and experience. It was good to have legal scholars and legally-minded people who presented the information as data so I could work with it to run regressions to understand the law’s impact. Not having to compile the data myself freed up my ability to develop measurements and do the analysis, and reduced coding errors I may have introduced because of my lack of legal knowledge.

    The complexity of the legal data is also an asset. Basic legal data is often a binary variable — does the law exist in a place or not. That is a flawed analytical mechanism. Whether or not a state law is in place doesn’t tell you much, but being able to see all the components and access robust measures, like reporting requirements, or funding mechanisms, lets you do more complex evaluation. More complexity in the data gives you a better picture of what’s going on.

    In an active legal space like the one I study, we can keep passing laws, but if it comes out that it doesn’t have any effect, we’re just wasting our money. Having that legal information allows someone like me, a public policy PhD candidate, to ask what does it mean to have this law in place, and not just the law but what is in the law.

    Bryce Pardo has published his research evaluating whether prescription drug monitoring programs reduce opioid overdose in the journal Addiction. He is a PhD candidate at University of Maryland in the Department of Public Policy.