Global health law has now emerged as an area of specialisation for students interested in global problems concerning health due largely, if not principally, to the inspiring lifelong scholarly work of Professor Lawrence Gostin. A growing number of universities in the world have established programs on global health law in which they address questions of equity and solidarity in addressing public health issues and emergencies, global and national preparedness for pandemics and other health related emergencies, international health regulations, and the intersection between health and human rights, to mention a few. We can expect that as global health threats and inequalities in access to health continue to rise, interest in global health law as a field of legal research and education will continue to grow.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) creates a new process to cap Medicare Part D branded drug prices. It prohibits Medicare from paying more than a specified discount from average private market prices and requires that CMS negotiate with manufacturers to agree on a maximum fair price that Medicare will pay that is lower than the specified discount. This article analyzes the cause of high drug prices and how negotiations to set the maximum fair price might unfold. It compares Medicare’s new pricing process to the way drug prices are set in Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, U.S. private insurers, and European nations. It analyzes how negotiations to set the maximum fair price might unfold in light of negotiation theory and the practices to negotiate prices employed in Europe. It draws inferences from the initial published data on the first round of negotiated prices.

This article critically examines the inequities in the access to COVID-19 vaccine and the lessons for global health law. Despite the rapid development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines, the rollout exposed severe systemic failures rooted in preexisting economic distortions and market inefficiencies. The article argues that addressing vaccine inequity requires more than improved distribution and solidarity, but effective reinvention of the global vaccine supply chain through evidence-based and meaningful market-shaping measures. It calls for a transformative approach to global health governance, emphasising the need for a comprehensive, human rights-compliant policy framework to correct structural problems in international markets, moving beyond superficial exhortations to equity.

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) represent a significant global health challenge, requiring distinct prevention and control strategies. Public health efforts have concentrated on regulating three primary risk factors: tobacco and nicotine products, unhealthy foods and beverages, and alcohol. While the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) stands as a legally binding international treaty, similar international legal efforts for alcohol and unhealthy foods have never gained significant traction. Consequently, global governance of NCD risk factors largely relies on soft law instruments, including WHO strategies, UN resolutions, and cross-sectoral initiatives that set political goals and technical standards. The article argues for the potential of a human rights-based approach to enhance global NCD regulation, emphasizing legal capacity building and managing industry influence. Future efforts should leverage regional and local governance, and ensure robust legislative frameworks to overcome the limitations of current international law and effectively address NCD risk factors.

Journal editors often deal with allegations of research misconduct, defined by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the United States as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. It is important that editors have a transparent and consistent process to deal with these allegations quickly and fairly. This process will include the authors and may include research integrity officers at the sponsoring institution as well as funders. Retractions may not be consistent with the ORI definition, for example, specifying inadequate peer-review and unreported conflict of interest, but nevertheless represent scientific misconduct.

This paper reflects on the availability of a key document in the research integrity landscape: Reports of institutional and university misconduct investigations. It reviews how universities have typically responded to calls for disclosure, offers suggestions to mitigate concerns, and argues that the failure to release such reports creates a critical evidence gap. It closes with a call for disclosure of such reports as a default.

Researchers involved in research misconduct proceedings are increasingly threatening or bringing legal defamation claims against the institutions, complainants, and publications involved in the proceedings. Although defamation claims do not often succeed, they can nevertheless be costly and lengthy. This article analyzes certain defamation cases in the research misconduct space and provides advice for institutions and other involved parties seeking to minimize potential defamation liability associated with research misconduct proceedings.

This article first describes shifts in human rights law that have led to improvements in the realization of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) over the last decade. The article does so, however, with careful attention to the structural factors beyond formal legal mechanisms that may undermine the ability of governments, even with the best of intentions, to fully develop the necessary robust health and justice systems. Second, this article considers two additional factors: the political economy factors that enable or limit the ability of States to realize SRHR, as well as the growing evidence base that supports positive legal transformation.

The federal government has a long history of trying to find the right balance in supporting scientific and medical research while protecting the public and other researchers from potential harms. To date, this balance has been generally calibrated differently across contexts – including in clinical care, human subjects research, and research integrity. New challenges continue to face this disparate model of regulation, including novel Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools. Because of potential increases in unintentional fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism using GenAI – and challenges establishing both these errors and intentionality in retrospect – this article argues that we should instead move toward a system that sets accepted community standards for the use of GenAI in research as prospective requirements.

This article discusses the prospects and pitfalls of a legally binding pandemic agreement under the auspices of the World Health Organization, currently under negotiation in Geneva. Such an agreement could foster a rules-based pandemic prevention, preparedness and response as a reaction to the failures by states during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a lack of effective coordination for sharing all kinds of data and the global inequity in the distribution of medical goods fueled by vaccine nationalism. Achieving these goals, however, will depend upon a meaningful engagement by delegations negotiating the agreement, a legally sound formulation of its provisions, and overcoming the currently pervasive emergency-bias in this field of global health law. Thus, as advocated by Lawrence Gostin in his seminal treatise on Global Health Law ten years ago, the pandemic agreement could help realize the transformative potential of law for facing one of the greatest health threats to humanity.

Research is a human enterprise, and for institutions to hold themselves accountable, people and structures must work in concert. Too many institutions limit their accountability to enforcing formal rules and regulations. This undermines their everyday functioning, institutional integrity, and public trust. In so doing, they fail to honor their own educational, research, and service missions. Institutional accountability for research integrity means going beyond enforcing regulations, teaching required responsible conduct of research courses, and responding to allegations of misconduct. It means recognizing and acting upon the knowledge that researchers’ interpersonal conduct is crucial for creating and sustaining productive and healthy work environments, and that work environments often dictate the norms and behaviors that create (or undermine) a strong culture of research integrity within an institution. Everyday actions of setting the tone, defining success, articulating values and expectations, and providing resources are crucial foundations of an institutional working culture that consistently values rigor, reproducibility, belonging, and integrity. Providing and normalizing engaging, relevant professional development programs is one way to be proactive about supporting all organizational members to be accountable for work cultures that buttress research integrity.

Multiple factors aligning in 2025 implicate challenges to vaccines as a primary public health intervention. Anti-vaccine proponents seek to recast immunization policies in promotion of perceived individual liberties. Recalibrating national vaccine approaches, however, runs counter to long-standing public health laws and policies grounded in a core truth: safe and effective vaccines save lives.

In Massachusetts, a proposed bill would reduce the sentence of those incarcerated who become living donors of either organs or bone marrow. We outline two concerns with such a proposal, which relate directly to the content of the proposal (as opposed to broader debates about payment for organs and validity of consent obtained from the incarcerated). The first of these concerns is about equality of opportunity. The proposal provides the opportunity for a sentence reduction for some but not for others – and the distribution of these opportunities reflects circumstances largely beyond the control of the incarcerated. The second concern is that the proposal may conflict with why we punish in the first place. The proposal is at odds with the non-consequentialist general deterrence defended by Tadros, retributivism, and communicative theories of punishment. Among the theories examined, only the purely consequentialist version of general deterrence might find the practice palatable. The upshot of the latter observation is that the proposal presupposes the truth of a purely consequentialist theory of punishment and sets aside others.

From the perspective of intellectual property (IP) and antitrust law, the overriding question in the pharmaceutical industry is how to navigate the tradeoff between innovation and access. It is into this debate that William Feldman steps with his important article adapted from recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dr. Feldman discusses an array of anticompetitive behavior. In this response piece, I focus on “patent thickets” and “product hopping” to emphasize how they often harm consumers without any innovation justification and how they can be addressed.

Law can function and act on norms, through legislation, regulation, treaties and the like. Law can also be a key accompaniment to activism. The career of Larry Gostin represents both aspects of the law in achieving social change.

In 2023 the Supreme Court of Mauritius cited human rights and public health arguments to strike down a colonial-era law criminalizing consensual same-sex sex. The parliament of Singapore recently did the same through legislative means. Are these aberrations or a shifting global consensus? This article documents a remarkable shift international legal shift regarding LGBTQ+ sexuality. Analysis of laws from 194 countries across multiple years demonstrates a clear, ongoing trend toward decriminalization globally. Where most countries criminalized same-sex sexuality in the 1980s, now two-thirds of countries do not criminalize under law. Additionally, 28 criminalizing countries in 2024 demonstrate a de facto policy of non-enforcement, a milestone towards legal change that all of the countries that have fully decriminalized since 2017 have taken. This has important public health effects, with health law lessons for an era of multiple pandemics. But amidst this trend, the reverse is occurring in some countries, with a counter-trend toward deeper, harsher criminalization of LGBTQ+ sexuality. Case studies of Angola, Singapore, India, Botswana, Mauritius, Cook Islands, Gabon, and Antigua and Barbuda show many politically- and legally-viable pathways to decriminalization and highlight actors in the executive, legislative, and judicial arenas of government and civil society engaged in legal change.

International law and global governance regimes for environmental health challenges have been slow to reflect the intertwined relationship between the environment and human health. Historical legacies have caused artificial fragmentation between the two that has resulted in distinct fields of international law and institutions for the environment and health. However, new global paradigms for thinking about environmental health have emerged to foster synthesis under global health law, including One Health and Planetary Health approaches, as well as through international human rights law like the recognition of the right to a clean, safe, and healthy environment. Guided by equity, new international law and global governance reforms, including the proposed Pandemic Agreement and Plastics Treaty, are opportunities to synthesize the intersecting dimensions of the environment and global health. However, future paths towards cohesion must explicitly incorporate human rights in environmental health governance, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples, while actively addressing inequities in global health law, between and within countries, and across generations.

Multi-institutional scientific research projects are increasingly common. Nevertheless, regulations and guidelines do not yet adequately address which entity should assume responsibility for research misconduct proceedings in multi-institutional research. This article explores the challenges of determining jurisdictional roles in research misconduct matters in collaborative science and proposes the application of a “jurisdictional interests test” as a framework for determining jurisdiction in multi-institutional research misconduct proceedings.

Colonialism has produced the global health system, and decoloniality must inform global health law. This article considers the foundational impact of colonialism on the global health system and advocates for adopting decoloniality as a crucial framework to reshape global health law. Through a historical lens, it examines how European colonialism established power dynamics and structures that continue to influence contemporary global health governance. This article calls for overcoming enduring challenges by emphasizing the urgency of dismantling outdated and unjust systems that perpetuate health inequities and hinder effective interventions. It argues for a paradigm shift toward epistemically inclusive, ethical, and equitable practices, emphasizing the active participation of marginalized communities in health policymaking. By addressing the root causes of health disparities and decoupling health systems from racial capitalism, a decolonial approach promises a more just and effective future for global health law.

Scientific legal mapping methods build on traditional comparative legal research practices, but add elements of transparency and reproducibility that can increase utility of research findings for empirical research, policymaking and public information. This comment on ”Global Legal Environment for LGBTQ+ Sexuality and Public Health” by Matthew Kavanagh et al. sets out the benefits of scientific legal research techniques and argues that legal scholars and their students can benefit from their wider adoption.