This article introduces a special issue on the legal determinants of health, following the publication of the Lancet–O’Neill Institute of Georgetown University Commission’s report on the subject. We contextualize legal determinants as a significant and vital aspect of the social determinants of health, explain the work of the Lancet–O’Neill Commission and outline where consequent research will usefully be directed. We also introduce the papers that follow in the special issue, which together set out in greater detail the work of the (...) Commission and critically engage with different aspects of the report and the application of its findings and recommendations. (shrink)

This article provides a critical analysis of ‘the legal’ in the legal determinants of health, with reference to the Lancet–O’Neill report on that topic. The analysis shows how law is framed as a fluid and porous concept, with legal measures and instruments being conceived as sociopolitical phenomena. I argue that the way that laws are grounded practically as part of a broader concept of politics and evaluated normatively for their instrumental value has important implications for the study of law itself. (...) This, in turn, has implications for how we approach the transdisciplinary ambitions that form a key part of the report’s recommendations to enhance law’s capacity to promote better, more equitable population health at local, national, international and global levels. (shrink)

This article is a response to the Lancet Commission on the Legal Determinants of Health from gendered perspectives and focusing on gender-based violence and abuse. The Lancet Commission sees the role of law as positive, indeed central in providing justice in global contexts, and this contribution explores and unpacks this assertion, drawing on some examples from India and elsewhere. Some feminists have argued that law and justice are incompatible for women, and this is sometimes borne out when we look at (...) legal reforms and interventions in the field of gender-based violence. However, we also explore the ways in which some women have used legal reforms in creative ways to destabilize patriarchal norms, and more broadly, how absence of legal protection can undermine access to rights. We conclude that law can have a symbolic relationship with justice. (shrink)

In The legal determinants of health: Harnessing the power of law for global health and sustainable development, Gostin et al. provide a sustained account of how law can and should be used as an instrument of health promotion. We pick up on the themes of this report with a specific focus of the importance of abortion for women’s sexual and reproductive health and the impact that particular ways of framing abortion in law can have on the lives of women and (...) girls. In this short comment, we wish to emphasize that abortion regulations need to move beyond frameworks based on narrow understandings of harm towards more progressive agendas that take into account the social determinants of health in order to reduce barriers to care. This contribution is particularly relevant to the Commission’s criticism that those ‘[l]aws that stigmatise or discriminate against marginalized populations are especially harmful and exacerbate health disparities’. (shrink)

This is a short postscript to the Public Health Ethics special issue on the legal determinants of health. We reflect briefly on emerging responses to COVID-19, and raise important questions of ethics and law that must be addressed; including through the lens of legal determinants, and with critical attention to what it means to protect health with justice.