In May 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework for the Sharing of Influenza Viruses and Access to Vaccines and Other Benefits (PIP Framework). The PIP Framework’s adoption ended years of difficult negotiations, which began after Indonesia...

Director-General Margaret Chan recently called the WHO overextended and unable to respond with speed and agility to today’s global health challenges. Given the importance of global health cooperation, few would dispute that a stronger, more effective WHO would benefit all. In this commentary,...

This paper seeks to identify a harmonious relationship between existing intellectual property law and biodiversity law through various international efforts relating to traditional medicine; and to discuss strategies for protecting traditional medicine knowledge, resources and biodiversity in...

Access to essential medicines is a critical problem that plagues many developing countries. With a daunting number of domestic constraints technologically, economically, and otherwise, developing countries are faced with a steep uphill battle to meet the human rights obligation of providing...

The U.S. Global Health Initiative (GHI) represents the Obama administration’s new strategy for international development assistance in health. With a pledge of $63 billion over six years, GHI aims to fund PEPFAR and a set of broader global health issues (e.g., maternal and child health,...

Global warming may well be the most profound moral issue ever to face the human species. Profound moral issues demand a profound response from law, and as we enter the twenty-first century, human rights is (at least at a rhetorical level) the law's best response to profound, unthinkable,...

Most industrialized countries have increased access to abortion over the past 30 years. Economic theory predicts that abortion laws affect sexual behavior since they change the marginal cost of having risky sex. We use gonorrhea incidence as a metric of risky sexual behavior. Using a panel of 41...

This article explores ecosystem service trading. To date, most of the literature on this topic has focused on programs in which those who purchase rights to ecosystems use them to replace other, damaged ecosystems. An example would be the Wetlands Mitigation Banking Program, about which much as...

Recent tobacco control regulation in North America and Western Europe has had a salutary effect, even if smoking remains a pressing public health hazard. But in the 21st century, the tobacco industry has quietly moved its locus of activity to lucrative, emerging markets: the vast populations in...

Experience teaches that the Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) will need a financing facility if it is to garner widespread acceptance among low-income countries. The promise of financing is a well-established carrot to encourage countries to assume new convention-imposed obligations...