Interview Written and Conducted by: Conner Feng (All answers are unedited and have been provided directly by Dr. Paul A. Locke.)
About Dr. Paul Locke: “Dr. Paul Locke, DrPh, MPH, JD, is an environmental health scientist and attorney who holds an MPH from Yale University School of Medicine and a DrPH from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law and is licensed to practice before the bars of the states of New York, the District of Columbia, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and the United States Supreme Court. Dr. Locke’s research and practice target the intersection of environmental health sciences, policy and law in the areas of radiation policy and law and the use of new, non-animal based methods in toxicity testing and research. His areas of study include the laboratory animal law, the 3Rs, implementation of new scientific methods in toxicity testing, radon risk science and policy, radiation risk analysis, uranium mining, protecting space workers, high-level radioactive waste disposal and the application of low dose radiobiology to policy making. He is the author and co-author of several book chapters and numerous papers, and has published in policy and scientific journals as well as law reviews” [1].
- One infrequently encounters someone who has a law degree, a Master of Public Health, and Public Health doctorate– can you describe your background and explain how [it all] come[s] together?
If you think about the practice of law, really lawyers are technicians: they understand how a system works and they use their knowledge to try to improve that system. People who have MPH and DrPH, they collect data [and] their job is to make that data tell a story. And then they use that to say, okay, we need to change this practice, we need to strengthen that practice.
The first part of your question is a little more complicated. First, I will admit, in the interest of full disclosure, it’s not like I had any great grand plan when I started my education that this is where I was going to end up… I was a history major, did a lot of chemistry and sort of pre-med stuff. Realized that that wasn’t for me. Went into public health, got my MPH. When I got my MPH, a president was elected who was clearly going to disinvest in the public health system. I was used to being a student, so I decided to stay in school.
I went to law school immediately after my MPH, and when I got my law degree, I took a job on Wall Street where I practiced law that involved financial transactions. My first job was making millions, millions at a time for millionaires. It was not as socially redeeming as I’d hoped, so I sort of transitioned into environmental law from there. I became very concerned about several environmental problems, mostly involving hazardous waste on land, and wanted to learn a lot more about the environmental science behind environmental law. After practicing law for about 15 years, I started back on my doctoral degree, and I got my doctoral degree around the time when I was probably a lawyer for 20 years.
After that, an opportunity came up at Hopkins to be involved in something called the Pew Environmental Health Commission… that commission sunsetted and I stayed at Hopkins on the faculty, and I’ve been there since then, which puts me at 25 years at Hopkins, which I sometimes find hard to believe, but it is true. I just split my career between about half of it practicing law full time and half of it being public health academic full time. In my years at Hopkins, I built up my practice, which is as you pointed out in your questions, a practice that tries to blend law and science to do good.
2. I want to follow up about your role as a professor at the School of Public Health. What does the average work day look like for you? And currently, what are some major projects that you’re working on?
Sure, the question that I ask myself when I’m heading for work is: alright, we have all this scientific information. What happens to it when it escapes from the journals and the labs and gets in the hands of policymakers?
Mostly I work around the issue of alternatives to using animals in biomedical research. There is an awful lot of issues associated with health that involve environmental exposures, and also there are issues with health that involve the need to apply science to humans to develop treatments and cures for diseases; how do we best study those? We have this system that we’ve developed over the course of really the late 19th, 20th century, even up through the 21st century based on animal studies. As close as some animals are to humans, they’re not humans. We need to figure out better ways to study things that get us out of animal models because in certain cases, animal models are just simply not informative enough for us to do things that are going to improve public health.
In the past, I’d say 20 years, there’s been a real acceleration in the technology around these in vitro, in other words, non-human, non-living models. You can develop little organs on a chip, lung on a chip, liver on a chip, heart on a chip, and you can test things in those… a lot of what I do on a day to day basis is try to figure out where we can fit those in to our current science so that we can make better decisions about environmental protection, about how to develop drugs, about how to do personalized medicine.
That requires really two things that me and my team need to do. The first thing is we need to understand the law, right? Because many of these are regulatory decisions. There are standards in the laws, in the regulations and the policies. The second thing is we need to obviously understand the science. That doesn’t necessarily mean we go into the lab and do all the science– but we have to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of that science and know how to explain that, and then we have to be able to blend the two.
3. Do you think your knowledge of the law, which the JD entails, lends you a unique perspective when involved in a science focused research project?
I do think it gives me a unique perspective. The thing that gives me the unique perspective is that I went to law school, but I also practiced law. It’s the same difference between going to medical school and practicing medicine. Just because you know how the lung works doesn’t mean you can be a pulmonologist, right? It’s the same thing with me. I had to go to court. I had to go write legal documents. I had to interact with other lawyers. I had to work with government officials. That really is what’s colored my approach to [law].
It does not necessarily change the way I do research as a scientist. There are certain things you have to do as a scientist to do good research, right? For example, one of the obvious ones is if you have to understand your data. Most of my scientific research is based on secondary data, but I have to understand what that data says and what it doesn’t say, how it was collected, what the strengths and weaknesses were. Then I need to know what tools I have to analyze the data. A major tool that we use to analyze data in public health is statistics. But not every statistical approach works with every set of data. Is your data, for example, normally distributed? Is it not normally distributed? Is your data censored in some way?
The one thing I think that makes a lot of my research unique is that I always try to conclude my papers with saying what the data means in terms of change: societal change. I’ll give you an example. I did an analysis with colleagues looking at the relationship between companion animal relinquishment in Baltimore, animal shelter and loss of housing. What we found is that people tend to relinquish their companion animals before they lose their housing. We said, if that’s the case, maybe we should be thinking about that event as a way to intervene and keep people in their housing. Because if you can get to people at the time they’re relinquishing their companion animal, you might be able to use legal tools to keep them in their housing. So that’s sort of an example of one of the research models we’ve used.
4. What are the main challenges in bridging the gap between science and policy, since these two things do not necessarily always fully align with each other. How do you think the law may better integrate scientific findings to support public health or public interest in general?
Well, I think the point you made is absolutely correct in that the two don’t always align. A lot of what you have to do is you have to understand the strengths and limitations of the law, and the strengths and limitations of the science.
The way I shorthand that in terms of the science, again, the data has to tell you a story, right? You have to cross-examine the data until it tells you the truth, but you can’t torture the data until it confesses what you want it to…
The other thing you have to do is you have to understand the strengths and limitations of the law. Societally, there are certain acceptable things that you can do with law and certain things that aren’t acceptable. We know that there is documented in public health a real issue associated with obesity, especially in young people. You can’t go to every middle school in the country, weigh all the kids, find the ones that you think are overweight, and then somehow try to get them on a nutritional program. You’re going to have to back up. Maybe you have an educational program for middle school folks so you can teach them about nutrition.
So a lot of times you end up with solutions that are not as aggressive as you want, but that’s the world we live in. The other thing you have to watch out for on the data side is you’ re going to have to make assumptions about certain things. To give you an example of that, if you’re trying to think about, for example, water contamination… you might need to know the average amount of water that a citizen in the U.S. who you’re trying to protect under U. S. laws drinks a day. Well, if we don’t have that data, you have to make a reasonable assumption based on the science. You do the best you can to get these two things to kind of match up, but sometimes they don’t.
5. What are some of the most pressing legal challenges or issues in public health law today that you think would be worth addressing, especially for someone who is interested in pursuing a career in this area in the future?
I think at the present time, the most pressing legal issues are constitutional issues. In the past two to three years, there have been a number of Supreme Court decisions that have changed the way we think about the relationship between science and law. And that includes the West Virginia v. EPA case, it includes the Loper Bright Enterprises case. Those are in my field, the environmental field. There are other cases in other fields that are also really shaking things up.
The point I think is really essential is that when you have a change like the change that has been worked by these cases, it creates uncertainty. It’s a real challenge for lawyers because they have kind of a rulebook under the “old system,” but when the Supreme Court changes the rules, they’re going to have to rebuild the rulebook. So there’s a lot of head-scratching and analysis about what the world’s going to look like going forward.
The Loper Bright case is particularly important, I think, because there was a principle that had existed in law since about 1984, 1985, called the Chevron principle, which meant—I’ ll give you kind of a rough definition of it—federal agencies, especially public health agencies, had in most cases the discretion to do certain things, and the courts would not question their judgment because they gave them the benefit of the doubt. Loper Bright changed that, which means that there’s going to be a lot more scrutiny of science-based decisions that are made, especially by public health agencies. So all of these decisions are science-based decisions that the agencies were making, and they were given some cushion to make them because of this Chevron principle that’s not there anymore. So what is that world going to look like? We don’t know.
Now, why is that important? Because, one, the agencies are probably going to tread a lot more slowly and carefully in trying to move regulations and policies. Two, it means that people are going to be more likely to challenge things, because they think they might have a better legal chance of prevailing. And three, in terms of our research, it means that we might have to really be doing different research, or we might have to be doing more research in areas where before we kind of felt like we had enough knowledge.
6. Many of us in the undergraduate Law Review are aspiring lawyers or policymakers, and many of [us], especially at Hopkins, are also interested in medical, health, and science-related issues. You are a great example of someone who has successfully brought that all together. What advice would you offer to aspiring policymakers and lawyers with these interdisciplinary interests?
The first thing I would say is that—this is a totally biased statement— but as a Hopkins graduate myself, you’re in the right place. You are going to come out of Hopkins with a very strong understanding of what research can do and what research can’t do. And that’s instrumental, because of course, not all legal principles are based on evidence-based science, right? Some are based on ethics, doing the right thing, human rights….
My experience is that you can learn a lot of this from the job, on the job. One thing I like to say about lawyers is that lawyers are Newtonians in a probabilistic world. If you look at the way lawyers approach evidence and the way they build their theory of the case, it’s pretty linear. There’s a famous case when you go to law school your first year—I think they still teach it—it’s called the Palsgraf case where this woman was on the train, these anarchists had some fireworks, the fireworks got set off, the setting off of the fireworks resulted in something falling on the woman. I like to think about that case because, to me, it demonstrates how lawyers often approach problems, which is: A resulted in B, and B resulted in C, and C resulted in D, and D resulted in E, and E caused a bad thing.
But you know that that’s not how science works, right? Science is a matter of probabilities of pulling things together from different angles, reaching some dead ends, taking two steps back, moving two steps to the right. So I think that one of the hardest things to really calibrate is the sort of Newtonian approach of law with the more probabilistic approach of science. That’s just one thing to keep in mind.
If you come out of this whole thing with an undergraduate degree in science from Hopkins and a law degree, I think you’re well positioned to really be active as a policy person because you’re going to have all the skills you need. I really value my science education. I also really value my legal education. My legal education really helped me shape my thinking. It helped me be very precise about the way I write. I think because I got my law degree first, I think it made me a better scientist.
Notes:
[1] Introductory biography from Dr. Paul Locke’s faculty page at https://publichealth.jhu.edu/faculty/430/paul-a-locke
JHULR 
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