Professional field-work: constructing global health law as an ‘emerging field’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Constructing international legal fields is the work of experts. Such experts struggle over a field’s substantive content, normative direction and formal boundaries. Less commonly observed are the ways in which fields are described as part of such work. In global health law, experts have used the term ‘emerging field’ to capture its ambivalent status between a non-field and an established field. In deploying this term, they demonstrate the term’s productive uses in establishing a plural, open-ended and experimental sphere of professional action that overcomes the criticisms of its predecessor, international health law. In theorising the notion of ‘emerging field’ as an example of professional field-work, this article points not only to the multiple registers of this nascent governance regime, but also to the changing style of international legal expertise itself.