Law as a Social Medicine: Enhancing International Inter-regime Regulatory Coopetition as a Means for the Establishment of a Global Health Governance Framework

This article argues that it is necessary to take a new conceptual and more integrated approach to global health governance in order to tackle some of the most serious challenges to public health. Such an integrated approach takes its first inspiration from the analogy between law and medicine, which surfaces in the form of "law as a social medicine." The analogy means that in the same way as a medical doctor must avoid administering a drug that would cause undesired side effects in the human organism, the lawyer must exercise extreme caution in the context of regulatory and legislative actions taken in response to a specific social problem.