Accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law Section of the American Public Health Association

 On October 24th I was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law Section of the American Public Health Association.

Here is the nomination statement from Marjorie Jaski, JD, MPH:

Attorney Daniel Swartzman
Nominee for APHA Law Section Lifetime Achievement Award

My nomination of Dr. Daniel Swartzman is derived from my time as his student at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, my continued association with Dr. Swartzman, and witness to his extensive following and influence on some of our brightest leaders today in Public Health as well as his lifelong career in public health law.

Professor Daniel Swartzman became an environmental public interest lawyer in the 1970’s, after graduating from Northwestern Law School and serving as Director of Legal Services for the Chicago Lung Association, working on issues in Illinois and nationally.  Upon receiving his MPH in Environmental Health Sciences in 1978, he also joined the faculty of University of Illinois (UIC) School of Public Health.  

At the School of Public Health, Dr. Swartzman taught some of the earliest classes in the country on public health advocacy and public health ethics, and, today, he is the most awarded teacher in the School’s history in this area.  During his tenure at UIC, he also served as Associate Dean of the School, and his book on cost-benefit analysis and environmental regulations has been widely reviewed and sits in more than 350 libraries around the world.  He has presented widely in conferences, including 20 abstracts at APHA, and in international settings. He started a joint JD/MPH program between UIC and the Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is currently working on a similar program with Loyola’s Health Law program.  His academic work has focused on environmental law, public policy making and social justice.  

Concurrent with Dr. Swartzman’s academic work, he opened his own law practice in 1985 focusing on toxic torts and private brownfield reclamations.  His law firm has been the only Chicago firm that took a cigarette manufacturer to a federal jury verdict, and he has helped close brownfield sites worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  His legal work has been influential in implementing the Clear Air Act Amendments, the work of the National Air Conservation Commission and the National Clear Air Coalition.

Over many years, Dr. Swartzman has helped advise more than two dozen student dissertations and served as advisor to hundreds of MPH students, at least 20 of whom were lawyers or who went on to law school.  In 2017, a group of former students started a campaign raising an endowment of over $100,000 for the “Daniel Swartzman Lecture in Public Health Ethics” at UIC.  He continues his work at Loyola’s new Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health, where he teaches both graduate and undergraduate students.  He advises undergraduate students on becoming lawyers.  He is busy developing teaching case studies focusing on social justice issues which Parkinson hopes to make widely available.

After a highly distinguished career in public health law, that continues to this day, I believe that Daniel Swartzman is an ideal candidate and highly worthy recipient of this award. 

And here are my remarks on accepting the award:

My remarks on receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the APHA Law Section
October 24, 2021

    This is a humbling experience.  I look at the previous recipients of this award, and I think “It is their work that my work is built upon.  These are the shoulders on which my achievement, such as it is, stands.”  With us tonight is the first recipient of this award, Scott Burris, and I am honored to be here with you, Professor Burris.  And I think about a couple of dozen people in our field who deserve this award more than I do.  Of course, I am not going to tell you who those people are, because I don’t want you to change your mind.

    You know, when I graduated from law school, back in 1975, I realized that one can take pride in how well one does their work and in what the work actually is.  But for many lawyers, that second part is not all that easy.  I know so many lawyers who have worked for decades, and have taken pride in how well they lawyer, but not necessarily in what the lawyering accomplished.  But I wanted to be a lawyer for Good things.  And I am sure all of you here tonight know exactly how that feels, because you all want to be lawyers for Good things.  As a public interest lawyer and then as a lawyer for people harmed by toxic chemicals and as a lawyer who helped people clean up polluted land, what we call “brownfields,” I am proud of what I have done.  But there is always that question in the back of your mind, is it enough?  Have I contributed enough?

    Then, a few years later, I became a teacher, teaching public health graduates and undergraduates how to work towards Good things.  Many of you are teachers.  You see your students learning and you can see by the tests scores that they understand the material.  But have you really helped them build careers to achieve what we Jews call “tikkun olam,” repairing the world?  I know that the professors here tonight understand the doubt that I am expressing.

    But four years ago, a large group of my former students worked together to collect more than $100,000 to endow a lectureship on public health ethics in my name at the UIC School of Public Health.  OK, I thought, I probably was doing some Good with those folks.

    And tonight, by being recognized by you, my peers, for my 46 years of practice and teaching and writing, I am being offered an acknowledgment that, yes, maybe what I have been doing was worthwhile, that I really did achieve something.  

    For that statement from you, I am very, very grateful.  Thank you so much for this honor.

No one exists alone; liberty is embedded in community

President Biden is taking concerted action to increase the number of Americans who are vaccinated.  It looks like public opinion favors this move, but he is being criticized by a small but highly vocal minority saying that his actions are unconstitutional and against individual liberty.

It is long established law in the US that the government has the authority to mandate actions, including vaccinations, to achieve public health goals.  This power lies mostly with the states, under the “police power,” the state’s responsibility to protect the “health, safety, welfare and morals” of the community.  This is why the President is only encouraging governors to act, since he does not have the power to force them to do so.  But the federal government does have the power to control the conditions of its own employees, and OSHA has the power to regulate health and safety in the workplace.  These actions will likely be challenged in court, but unless the courts decide to change more than a century of strong, legal public health protections, the President’s actions should be upheld.

But what of that small and noisy minority who insist that this is a violation of their personal liberty?  I think the key is to ask about the context of liberty. We have for a very long time treated liberty as something that is separate from the community. The two are presented as opposing positions, inevitably at odds.  This has become so pronounced over the last forty year that I have taken to calling this a “fetishization” of individual liberty.

I think this view, that liberty is somehow removed from community, is not useful or accurate. Individual liberty does not exist without a community that supports individual members in their individual choices. What keeps us from being a battle-royal of every individual against every other individual is the presence of an overarching community that provides a safe and respected place for individual action.  I believe there is no society of individuals that exists without a healthy community. I said this in a tweet a couple of months ago:

"Freedom is not separate from the needs of the community. It is a right that is protected by, empowered by the community. Individuals enjoying their freedom must respect the community that protects it. A healthy community guarantees freedom, within limits of the community's needs."

Some people say that the individual is the basic unit of analysis within a society. But this makes little sense in arranging the affairs of social animals such as humans.  Who keeps the commons open to individual thought and actions?  I think we were all members of a community before we ever realized that we were individuals. There is no history of individual humans wandering alone in the grasses or forests fending for himself or herself. Our history starts with hearths, kinship, mutual protection and, most of all, caring for “the other.” Going off on one’s own only happens after the community raises you to the point of being ready to try that.  And it is probably waiting behind you when you return, helping you in bad times or sharing in your successes.

We are all inevitably embedded in community, either one present in our lives today or one that operated in the past to support our families and allowed us to get to the point of “striking out on our own.”  If we perpetuate the illusion that all of our successes are due only to our own efforts, we will neglect the communities that are just as responsible as we are for our achievements.  And not being vaccinated and not wearing masks are exactly that neglect.