APHA Honors Magda Schaler-Haynes with Award for Public Health Law
The American Public Health Association (APHA) Law Section is honoring Magda Schaler-Haynes, JD, MPH ’98, professor of health policy and management, with its 2026 Jennifer Robbins Award for the Practice of Public Health Law, recognizing her leadership and dedication to the field.
The award is named for Jennifer Robbins (1940-1987), a public health lawyer who practiced in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and later served as an Assistant Attorney General in Maryland and principal counsel for the state’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The APHA Law Section will formally recognize Schaler-Haynes at the 2026 APHA Annual Meeting.
“I’m honored to be recognized by my peers, and I’m especially touched that the award is named in the memory of Jennifer Robbins, who was a public health lawyer dedicated to public service and whose impactful life was far too short,” Schaler-Haynes says. “I have learned from so many mentors and colleagues working in this field, and I’m proud to do my part to advance the use of law to promote and protect public health.”
Schaler-Haynes earned her MPH and JD at Columbia, then went on to a career in government. Until joining the Columbia Mailman faculty full time in 2022, she served in New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy's administration, most recently as Senior Advisor at the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she helped expand the health care workforce and improve access to telehealth services. And in preparation for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, she helped codify the right to abortion into state law; separately, she cleared the way for advanced practice clinicians to provide early abortion care, expanding the pool of providers who can deliver safe abortion care. In previous roles, she worked to remove barriers to midwifery care and implemented New Jersey’s transgender birth and death certificate law and medical aid in dying law, among other accomplishments. She recently served on New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill’s health care transition team.
While she worked in government, Schaler-Haynes taught popular public health law and abortion law courses in the Department of Health Policy and Management. She also created internship programs to bring public health students into public service. “In serving on the adjunct faculty, I was keenly aware that teaching public health law helped me become a better practitioner of public health law, and being a practitioner of public health law has expanded my abilities to teach public health law,” she says.
Public Health Law: An Essential Skill
Since joining the full-time faculty, Schaler-Haynes has worked to expand students’ access to public health law courses across the country. She argues that now, more than ever, a basic understanding of the law is a critical skill for anyone working in public health. It’s also an in-demand skill. In fact, 39 percent of MPH job postings included “regulation and legal compliance” as a skill in a scan conducted between 2022 and 2023. Even so, most schools of public health do not offer a course in public health law, although this is starting to change.
At Columbia Mailman, all Health Policy and Management students on the policy track are required to take Schaler-Haynes’ course on public health law. Looking ahead, the School may soon add a public health law component to its Core curriculum. More consequentially, the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH), which sets standards for public health education, may add public health law as a requirement for all accredited schools of public health. Schaler-Haynes and colleagues have advocated for this change, and it appears to be on track (they made their case over the summer in a well-attended CEPH webinar).
In 2024, Schaler-Haynes and Heather Krasna, Columbia Mailman Associate Dean of Career and Professional Development, established the Public Health Law Teaching Project. With funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they have distributed seed funding to five public health schools so far to support teaching public health law.
They argue that nearly all of the biggest public health accomplishments of the last century were achieved through legal means. Vaccination requirements are encoded in laws, clean air and water standards are set by regulations, and the historic tobacco settlement was achieved in part through litigation. Of course, the law can also be used to harm public health, as in the case of the 2022 Dobbs Supreme Court decision, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. “Law has never been more important to public health. It’s a difficult time for public health, and the law provides important tools to advance and defend our collective health and safety,” Schaler-Haynes says.
“We need to teach public health students how, without getting a law degree, they can be conversant and agile at using the tools of law. They should be thinking about the legislative, regulatory, or judicial strategies that can help them achieve their public health goals. Not having any exposure or understanding of the Constitution while becoming a public health practitioner in 2026, to my mind, seems wholly inadequate for the job before us,” she concludes.