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.

    Health Policy Expert
    "LawAtlas is valuable because it provides an access point for laws that should have been there a long time ago."

    Kelly’s story:

    In our work, we build datasets from scratch to understand the legal landscape for issues related to our field, state by state.

    Policy surveillance is important because it creates more transparency between lawmakers and the people who are actually impacted by the laws they pass. It’s important at a legislative level to understand what jurisdictions are doing, and outcomes, before making decisions in your own jurisdiction.

    Having a vantage point to see what’s happened in the past is also so useful. In case law we always talk about precedence; with laws we often lose sense of what happened in the past. Tracking laws back in time creates a concrete vantage point to see that.

    I’m an advocate of people being able to understand laws that impact their lives. We have to have laws, so they should be understandable by lay people. People generally can’t understand the nuances and actual effects of laws without paying an exorbitant fee to an attorney to explain them if they’re in violation of something, or have had some sort of legal issue. LawAtlas is valuable because it provides an access point for laws that should have been there a long time ago.

    Kelly Thompson and the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium have published datasets to LawAtlas.org that track telehealth laws, emergency suspension powers, and nurse practitioner prescribing laws. She is a law and policy manager for the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium.