Legal, Moral and Political Determinants within the Social Determinants of Health: Approaching Transdisciplinary Challenges through Intradisciplinary Reflection.

John Coggon

doi:10.1093/phe/phaa009

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Legal, Moral and Political Determinants within the Social Determinants of Health: Approaching Transdisciplinary Challenges through Intradisciplinary Reflection
The analysis shows how law is framed as a fluid and porous concept, with legal measures and instruments being conceived as sociopolitical phenomena
Accommodation of measures and instruments within international law that do not enjoy all of the defining trappings of domestic laws accords with many jurisprudential traditions and assumptions (Fidler, 2008; Coggon, 2014). It conforms too with the distinct emphases and framing in Gostin’s definition of global health law in his independent work, which is more firmly rooted in concepts of governance (Gostin, 2014), as contrasted with Gostin and Lindsay Wiley’s definition of public health law, which more rigidly focuses on prototypical concepts of law and legal form (Gostin and Wiley, 2016). It bears stressing, having made these points, that the Lancet–O’Neill report’s overall emphasis on the functions of law and its instrumentalist approach to understanding and evaluating law mean that there is an embrace of governance within the legal determinants of health, both at domestic and international/transnational/global levels

Summary

Introduction

Moral and Political Determinants within the Social Determinants of Health: Approaching Transdisciplinary Challenges through Intradisciplinary Reflection. It bears stressing, having made these points, that the Lancet–O’Neill report’s overall emphasis on the functions of law (outlined in the opening section of this paper) and its instrumentalist approach to understanding and evaluating law mean that there is an embrace of governance within the legal determinants of health, both at domestic and international/transnational/global levels (see Coggon et al, 2017: chapter 4).

Results

Conclusion