ABSTRACT
Public health law is firmly establishing itself as a crucial area of scholarly inquiry. Its vital importance has been sharply underscored following the outbreak of COVID-19, in response to which we have seen the institution of extreme legal measures—such as the UK's Coronavirus Act 2020—in efforts to control and contain the spread of the disease. The pandemic has also starkly exposed the complex nature of the regulatory challenges, nationally, internationally, and globally, to which such public health problems give rise. In approaching these, and other questions concerning the public's health, such as non-communicable disease, public health law, as a field, brings notable distinctive features: these include a practical focus on populations, institutions, the prevention of ill health, protection of good health, and the promotion of positive states of well-being;and concomitant critical approaches rooted in theories of social justice as contrasted with more narrow biomedical ethics. Such features make it in some senses atypical territory within the field of health law. Furthermore, the inherent role of political institutions places law conceptually within public health in a way that may be seen as distinguishable from law's relationship with clinical medicine. This chapter explains how the broad reach and distinct features of public health require a commensurately broad approach to conceptualising public health law, and how distinct practical and theoretical features may be integrated into academic public health law. It also shows how public health law, with its distinct conceptualisations concerning ‘the body' of medical jurisprudence, can both challenge and enrich medico-legal studies, and bring important perspectives within the broader field of health law. © 2020, The Author(s).
ABSTRACT
In this presentation, I aim to complement the ideas presented by the other speakers by raising questions about ethics and (different senses of) integrity. In particular, against the pressures of providing evidence bases for governmental decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic, I ask critically whether, or to what extent, we find harmony between the integrity of science, scientists, and democratic decision-makers. The potential for tensions is explained through consideration of public communication, pluralism in scientific knowledge bases, basic uncertainty, and fundamental principles such as transparency in political decisions. The reality of the tensions is found by considering some limits of ‘the science’ as it has been used in political turns of phrases such as ‘we are following the science’. The tensions are particularly evident where there are gaps given expedited methodologies, when we explore how ‘the science’ actually represents a plural concept, and where we acknowledge that science even broadly conceived is not able to be all that leads decision-making. And they are compounded by factors that might motivate silence or simplification in public communication, such as the apparent appeal of making ‘the science’ seem clearer or more uniformly agreed than may be the case, or by using ‘the science’ to avoid or obfuscate discussion of value judgments. The complexities of these ethical points provide their own important context for evaluating evidence-based policy within and beyond the pandemic.