Emma Kaeser, J.D., is a staff attorney with the Network for Public Health Law’s Mid-States Region. Her current areas of focus include legal and policy issues related to privacy, health information sharing, and public health authority. She is particularly interested in work to dismantle punitive systems that harm communities and to advance equitable access to health-affirming services and conditions. At the Network, Emma provides support in the form of research, legal technical assistance, training, and practical resources to assist those working to promote healthier communities.
Before joining the Network, Emma served as a law clerk for the United States District Court for the Central District of California. Prior to that, she worked as a litigation associate at a law firm and had an active pro bono practice advocating for the rights of youth with disabilities through direct services and impact litigation. Emma holds a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Princeton University and a law degree from Stanford Law School. While in law school, Emma worked with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, researching and developing resources on school policing and exclusionary school discipline as drivers of racial health inequity among youth.
by Overview Maintaining the privacy of reproductive health information is critical for ensuring access to care, promoting open communication with providers, and preventing…
This Micro-Toolkit is a simple, accessible framework that will guide you through six steps to assess potential equity implications for a new or existing policy and help you identify opportunities for improvement and for continued assessment.
States rely on data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) to identify and monitor troubling trends in adolescent health and develop programmatic and policy interventions. In January, YRBSS data were among many federal data resources pulled from public access in response to vague and scientifically unsupported executive orders signed by President Trump. The result is a dangerous blind spot at precisely the moment when schools, health agencies, and policymakers need clear information the most.
The divide between states seeking to restrict abortion and states permitting it continues to widen, as the former pursue new, increasingly draconian, maneuvers to restrict abortion access and the latter bolster protections in response. The intra-state conflict incited by this divide is coming to a head in a legal struggle between Texas and New York. The lawsuit, Texas v. Bruck, challenges enforcement of a New York shield law and threatens the viability of such legal safeguards moving forward, with major consequences for reproductive health care access.
This webinar will offer attendees an overview of changes in law and policy that impact access to reproductive health care directly or through indirect measures that deter pregnant people from seeking care. This webinar is an extension of a workshop held at the recent 2025 Public Health Law Conference and the bulk of the time will be devoted to attendees’ questions on the topics presented.
In recognition of International Overdose Awareness Day on August 31, 2025, Network attorneys and staff have identified seven policies with the potential to improve overdose prevention and advance the health of people who use drugs across the United States. This policy brief covers a wide range of areas, including well known, evidence-based harm reduction strategies and frameworks, as well as more novel policies that intersect climate change and drug policy.
Though state and local health departments are commonly given broad authority to serve their mandate to protect the health of the people in their jurisdictions, they are also tasked with many affirmative duties. This fact sheet lists some of these key public health service requirements of the Tennessee Department of Health and the state’s local health departments.
In recent years, federal, state, and local child welfare agencies have begun to develop data sharing policies and practices to support sharing child welfare data with other agencies. These agencies intend to use data sharing to enhance the government’s ability to coordinate and improve the provision of social services. This issue brief explores the relationships between child welfare, public health, data sharing, and racial and income disparities. It includes recommendations for agencies, community partnerships, and policy researchers to incorporate into the development of data sharing and use practices to reduce the risk of further perpetuating harm against vulnerable communities.
Improving the social determinants of health, the conditions where people are born, live, work, and play is necessary to make progress towards health equity. Community power building can help pave the way to better health outcomes by targeting the underlying conditions that shape these outcomes. This policy brief discusses what community building is and focuses on local community power building opportunities, highlighting laws, local policies, organizations, and programs that may be leveraged by community groups in King County, Washington.
Proponents of the December 23, 2004 Health Care Privacy (Rule) say it is vital to ensuring confidentiality of communications between patients and health care providers. Nevertheless, litigation aiming to invalidate the new Rule continues. This factsheet provides an overview of four lawsuits against the Rule and what might be gleaned from these cases about the new administration’s position on HIPAA’s protections for reproductive health care.
A Community Information Exchanges (CIE™) is a community governed network of health and social service providers that can facilitate data sharing among healthcare, social services, and community-based organizations to facilitate more holistic and coordinated care, and advance public health. This resource examines common features of legal frameworks developed to facilitate the flow of information in CIEs around the country.
This resource provides an overview of several of the Trump Administration’s immigration-related executive actions and identifies legal challenges. It then highlights how these and other anti-immigrant efforts harm the public’s health and deepen health inequities. Finally, it provides answers to frequent questions on implications for health departments, community-based organizations, and others navigating the changing landscape.
