Abstract

This essay describes an interdisciplinary educational experiment in health law. The experiment was funded by the National Science Foundation, received Institutional Review Board approvals, incorporated inter-disciplinary faculty and graduate students from several universities in Atlanta, and employed problem-based learning. After discussing my motivation to undertake this experimental approach to teaching health law, I explain how the course was developed and structured and how we are assessing its results. I also offer some reflections on why other health law teachers might be motivated to incorporate some features of our experimental approach into their own classes, and some thoughts on how they might do so based on lessons learned.I undertook this experiment to test in an educational setting an approach to problem solving that I have developed for addressing certain kinds of seemingly intractable policy problems. I call this a “navigational approach” to “fractious problems.”