Liz Tobin Tyler is the Director of Public Service and Community Partnerships at the Feinstein Institute and a Lecturer in Public Interest Law. She directs the law school’s public service program and connects students to the community though a range of law school-community partnerships. She is also a leading expert on medical-legal partnership. In 2011, she published Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership, the first book on the topic, and regularly presents nationally on the role of law in addressing the social determinants of health and health disparities. She teaches in the areas of health, poverty and gender and law.

In addition to her work at RWU Law, Ms. Tobin Tyler serves as Co-Director of the Scholarly Concentration in Advocacy and Activism at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Prior to her current  work, she was a Policy Analyst at Rhode Island Kids Count, a consulting attorney to community organizations on legal issues involved in lead paint poisoning, and  a public policy fellow at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy, where she also taught family law and policy.

Selected Publications

Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership (edit. E. Tobin Tyler, E. Lawton, K. Conroy, M. Sandel & B. Zuckerman) Carolina Academic Press, 2011.

 “Aligning Public Health, Health Care, Law and Policy: Medical-Legal Partnership as a Multilevel Response to the Social Determinants of Health,” 8 Journal of Health and Biomedical Law 211 (2012).

“Advancing Health Law and Social Justice in the Clinic, the Classroom and the Community”, 21 Annals of Health Law 237 (2012) (with E. Benfer, J. Ammann, L. Bliss, S. Caley, R. Pettignano).

 “Don’t Do it Alone: A Community-Based, Collaborative Approach to Pro Bono” (with L. Barron, S.  Harrington-Steppen and E. Vorenberg), 23 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 323 (Spring 2010).

“Allies Not Adversaries: Teaching Collaboration to the Next Generation of Doctors and Lawyers to Address Social Inequality,” 11 Journal of Health Care Law & Policy 249 (Summer 2008).