Washington & Lee School of Law issues an international ranking of all law journals on July 15 of each year. This year, CWRU’s Health Matrix: Journal of Law-Medicine was ranked third best among 56 ranked health law journals. Sharona Hoffman, the journal’s advisor, said “Congratulations to all of Health Matrix’s hard-working editors. The School of Law is very proud of this achievement!”
The journal was originally conceived in 1981 as a cooperative venture of six of the professional schools at Case Western Reserve University (School of Law, School of Medicine, Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Weatherhead School of Management, School of Dental Medicine, and Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences). The journal was designed to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of information about innovations and improvements in numerous aspects of the healthcare field. In order to be accepted for publication, an article therefore had to cover at least two of the six subject areas (e.g., law and dentistry).
Although the journal was edited by students, final editorial decisions were originally made by Duncan Neuhauser, a professor at the school of medicine, and it was first published in 1982 by a commercial press. As time went on, the editorial work increasingly was performed by law students, and when the commercial publisher bowed out in 1989, the decision was made to make the journal a student-edited journal at the law school, along with the Law Review and the Journal of International Law.
Each issue of Health Matrix includes articles by national scholars as well as student notes, written under the supervision of a faculty member. The journal also features articles that grow out of a symposium on a significant, contemporary health law topic, such as corporate wellness programs, reproductive rights, health disparities and medical big data. Health Matrix enables our students to gain experience writing, editing and publishing scholarly work in our internationally prominent health law journal.