Ruqaiijah Yearby

Ruqaiijah Yearby, JD, MPH is the inaugural Kara J. Trott Professor in Health Law at the Moritz College of Law and professor in the Department of Health Services Management and Policy at the College of Public Health.

Prof. Yearby has received more than $5 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to study structural racism and discrimination in vaccine allocation and from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the equitable enforcement of housing laws and structural racism in the health care system.

Her work has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Emory Law Journal, Health Affairs and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences.

She worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as an Assistant Regional Counsel and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Bioethics; Health Care Law; Health Care Regulation; Health Justice; Public Health Law; Structural and Social Determinants of Health

• JD, Georgetown University Law Center, 2000
• MPH, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2000
• BS in Honors Biology, University of Michigan, 1996

1. Lindsay Wiley, Ruqaiijah Yearby, Brietta R. Clark, and Seema Mohapatra, Introduction: What is Heath Justice?, 50(4) J. OF L. MED. & ETHICS 636-640 (2023)
2. The Social Determinants of Health, Health Disparities, and Health Justice, 50(4) J. OF L. MED. & ETHICS 641-649 (2023) (lead article)
3. Ruqaiijah Yearby, Crystal Lewis, and Charysse Gibson, Incorporating Structural Racism, Employment Discrimination, and Economic Inequities in the Social Determinants of Health framework to Understand Agricultural Worker Health Inequities, 112(Supp. 1) AM. J PUBLIC HEALTH S65-71 (2023)
4. Ruqaiijah Yearby, Brietta R. Clark, and Jose F. Figueroa, Structural Racism in Historical and Modern U.S. Health Care Policy, 41(2) HEALTH AFFAIRS 187-194 (2022)(One of the top ten read articles of 2022 in HEALTH AFFAIRS)
5. Ruqaiijah Yearby and Seema Mohapatra, Systemic Racism, The Government’s Pandemic Response, and Racial Inequities in COVID-19, 70 EMORY LAW J. 1419-1473 (2021)(cited in Peter Coy, The Legacy of the Lost Year Will Be Devastating Inequality, BLOOMBERG NEWS on Mar. 10, 2021)
6. Phillip Sloane, Ruqaiijah Yearby, R. Tamara Konetzka, Yue Li, Robert Espinoza, and Sheryl Zimmerman, Addressing Systemic Racism in Nursing Homes: A Time for Action, 22(4) JAMDA 886-892 (2021)
7. Race Based Medicine, Color Blind Disease: How Racism in Medicine Harms Us All, 21(2) AMERICAN J. OF BIOETHICS 19-27 (online Dec. 5, 2020; in print 2021)(On October 23, 2023, listed as one of the top two cited articles in the last three years (2020-2023) in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS)
8. Emily Benfer, Seema Mohapatra, Lindsay Wiley, and Ruqaiijah Yearby, Health Justice Strategies to Combat the Pandemic: Eliminating Discrimination, Poverty, and Health Inequities During and After COVID-19, 19 YALE J. HEALTH POLICY, LAW, AND ETHICS 125-171 (2020) (cited in Ed Young, Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Lead Us, THE ATLANTIC on Dec. 29, 2020)
9. Structural Racism and Health Disparities: Reconfiguring the Social Determinants of Health Framework to Include the Root Cause, 48 J. OF L. MED. & ETHICS 518-526 (2020)(Framework featured in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Equity and Health Disparities Environmental Scan)
10. Lindsay F. Wiley, Ruqaiijah Yearby, and Andrew Hammond, United States: Legal Response to Covid-19, in Jeff King and Octávio LM Ferraz et al (eds), The Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19 ( 2023 and 2021)(cited in 2022 and 2023 EU report)