David Orentlicher and Tamara K.Hervey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law

Abstract

Health Law and Comparative Law are two areas which receive continuing attention about their respective scope, and while policymakers and academics alike routinely draw on insights from other countries and systems in analysing and developing health law and policy, defining ‘comparative health law’ is no mean feat. This may be explained in part by healthcare (provision and access) remaining ‘peculiarly and tenaciously local in its character’,1 as distinct even from ancillary fields (such as the pharmaceutical sector) which may be global in nature. The sheer reach of ‘health law’—encompassing in very broad terms assisted reproductive technologies to assisted dying—indicates its universal nature, as does its common interdisciplinary pairing with bioethics. Once it is accepted that health is subject to myriad considerations across the world, then comparison becomes not just useful, but essential both for academic research and policy learning. Indeed, one of the many insights from the Covid-19 pandemic is surely how multifaceted ‘health law’ can, and should be: encompassing not only the potential for re-evaluating ethical underpinnings of healthcare access, but also the influence and effects of supranational legal systems, as well as questions of healthcare system organisation at a national level.