GLOBAL HEALTH LAW
International health law, or what is now also called global health law, is a relatively new academic field. In its broadest definition, it includes all international legal regimes relevant to public health—international environmental law, international humanitarian and human rights law, international trade and labor law, international laws relating to arms control, and so on. There is an important distinction between international health law and global health law. International health law connotes a more traditional approach derived from rules governing relations among nation-states. Global health law, on the other hand, is developing an international structure based on the world as a community, not just a collection of nation-states. We offer a normative theory of global health law. It builds on a theory of health and social justice. We argue that the global community has an ethical and moral responsibility to take positive actions to achieve health equity and should do so through global and domestic tools in law, policy, and institutions. Our theory takes human flourishing as the end goal of a global society and proposes that global health law be examined in terms of an ethical demand for health equity. It views global health law not as a legally enforceable and coercively mandated set of rules forced on states or as a component of any one country’s foreign policy or state interest, but as one of a collection of tools and processes for bringing together multiple transnational actors, both state and nonstate, through a global health system committed to shared health governance and global health equity.