Pursuing Global Health with Justice: Review of Global Health Law

In 2000, LawrenceGostin published the first edition ofPublic Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. With that book, which now has a third edition in progress, Gostin sought to ‘explain why public health law is a coherent field, distinct from other intellectual activities at the intersection of health and law’.1 Gostin’s book played a major role in triggering a ‘renaissance’ of public health law, which, although possessing deep historical roots, had largely been lost in the shadow of health care law in the second half of the 20th century.2 Since 2000, there has been a ‘proliferation of public health law scholarship, with new law school courses, new casebooks, new treatises, and an ever-growing number of law review articles and symposia’.3 While world events such as the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the threat of bioterrorism attacks led to a renewed interest in public health issues, Gostin deserves much of the credit for crystallizing that interest into an emerging academic discipline. With his new book, Global Health Law, Gostin has once again assumed the task of outlining a new field.4 As the O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law at Georgetown Law and the director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for Global Health Law, Gostin has written extensively about global health law over the past decade.5 With this book, he seeks to organize the subject in a systematic way, while exploring in depth some key