Rx for Justice
SLU LAW's new Academic Medical-Legal Partnership works from patients to policy.
Professor Danielle Pelfrey Duryea has lofty goals. Since coming to Saint Louis University School of Law to lead the newly formed academic medical-legal partnership (MLP), dubbed “Rx for Justice,” she has been busy meeting with partners in the School of Medicine and SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital to discover the best ways to integrate legal work into pediatric and family health care in the St. Louis area. And her goal, well, “change the world,” she laughs.
Pelfrey Duryea joined the SLU LAW faculty in January of 2025 from Boston University to lead the first academic MLP in the area. Announced just before her arrival, the MLP is the brainchild of Center of Health Law Studies Professor Sidney Watson and Dr. Fred Rottnek, who holds an appointment in the Center for Health Law Studies and is program director of SSM Health/SLU Addiction Medicine Fellowship, and professor in SLU’s School of Medicine. Rottnek and Watson joined together with leaders at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Hospital with the aim to train the next generation of professionals to address social determinants of health and structural inequities. As part of the multi-disciplinary care teams, law student-attorneys, pediatric resident physicians, SLU Law and Medicine faculty, and other health professional team members will learn about, from, and with each other in both clinical and classroom settings to identify and address health-harming legal needs at the individual, institutional, and government levels.
Within the School of Law, Pelfrey Duryea and the MLP clinic are part of both the Center for Health Law Studies and the SLU LAW Legal Clinics.
“With its top-ranked health law program, justice-oriented student body, and service mission, SLU is the perfect setting for an academic MLP,” said Pelfrey Duryea. “Direct client work, training and teaching, and systemic policy work are all part of the plan. Sidney, Fred, and the leadership team at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital really laid the best foundation for this project and working with them has been a joy.”
Pelfrey Duryea has been hard at work setting the stage to launch the MLP into the world. Through much discernment, the group chose SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Pediatrics’ Danis Pediatric Center as the home of the academic MLP. The Danis Center, named after pioneering pediatrician and a founder of the hospital, Dr. Peter Danis, is known as an innovative pediatrics practice that provides evidence-based care and services for children in all aspects of pediatrics (physical, mental, and emotional health) from infancy through adolescence.
According to Pelfrey Duryea, MLP clinic student-attorneys will coordinate especially closely with the Danis Connection and Resource Equity Services (CARES) program. The CARES program, known for providing wraparound services beyond healthcare, helps qualifying families by providing helpful resources as well as having family navigators, or social workers, follow up with supportive care and guidance to community resources. As the Danis clinic has a very high Medicaid population and a large number of low-income families, the CARES program helps with things like food insecurity, utilities and rent assistance, childcare and medical insurance.
With the Rx for Justice MLP, these services will be expanded to include legal assistance dedicated[SW1] to Danis families. Pelfrey Duryea expects she and the students will see benefits appeals, eviction matters, educational rights matters, family law matters, and housing conditions issues that arise with older homes, like lead paint, mold, etc. Nationally, it is estimated that the average low-income household faces at least two unmet legal needs at any given time.
“They have been screening for and responding to ‘social needs’ at Danis for a long time,” she said. “We’re working to integrate Rx for Justice seamlessly to amplify Danis’ capacity to support patient-families.” The direct client services will inform an advocacy agenda to address laws, rules, and regulations that perpetuate health harm legal needs. This advocacy agenda, along with research and program evaluation puts the “academic” in academic medical-legal partnership.
Pelfrey Duryea has a long history with medical-legal partnerships. She first got involved as an associate at Ropes & Gray in Boston where she co-founded the firm’s nationally recognized MLP pro bono program. After she began teaching, Pelfrey Duryea started an MLP clinic at the University at Buffalo School of Law. And finally, she returned back to Boston where she started an MLP focused on policy change at Boston University School of Law. Needless to say, she is a firm believer in the power of the partnership between medical and legal education and service.
“When I first learned about the model, I thought: this makes so much sense – take the services to where people are. And the MLP model recognizes that individual legal services are not an end-all-be-all solution by working interprofessionally on ‘upstream,’ systems-level solutions designed to help people avoid emergency legal situations.”
Pelfrey Duryea says they are continuing to move forward with a full-scale launch in January when the MLP Clinic will start taking families for representation. The hope is for 8 law students to participate, which is a national best practice.
“MLP is a really powerful setting for student learning in the clinic in addition to the wonderful clinics we already have here providing critical services in so many other areas,” said Pelfrey Duryea. “The health law students seem hungry for this type of experience. This is an incredible opportunity to do health-supporting system-level work – building on the incredible work already being done in our region. The ability to be integrated into the community in a really meaningful way as an institution, to be a part of the community in a way that will support and expand health equity. Every kid has a right to be healthy and a right to thrive. An MLP is not the only tool, but it is a very useful tool in a quest to make that true in the world.”
Pelfrey Duryea says that a referral network will be critical to the number of families that Rx for Justice will be able to serve. If alumni are interested in being a part of the MLP, you are invited to reach out to Pelfrey Duryea directly via dpelfreyduryea@slu.edu.
Get involved in the Medical Legal Partnership Clinic