Annual Pike Conference: The Future of Health Law

Hosted by Boston University Schools of Law and Public Health

This year’s Pike Conference, titled The Future of Health Law, features several presenters, including Wendy Mariner, a School of Public Health professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights, and George Annas, the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights, who give their take on the topic Convergence: Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights.

In her talk, Picking a Paradigm for Health Law, Mariner says that social determinants of global health are becoming more important. She starts by pointing out the difficulty of defining health law and asking several questions. Is it an eclectic and integrated translegal field? Is there a theory of health law? She says that the health law field goes well beyond medical care. She cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for their health and well-being, including medical care and necessary social services. She goes on to say that the right to health contains both freedoms and entitlements and that human rights to health (respect, protect, fulfill) have parallels with health laws. Health law encompasses how we use law in health fields and also “entails protecting both human freedoms and developing social institutions that make good health possible,” she says.

In Metaphors for the Emerging Field, Annas talks about the beginnings of health law, international human rights laws, and the field of bioethics after World War II with the Nuremberg trials. The war was a cataclysmic event, he says, which ushered in the era of international human rights law and bioethics, and these have been growing ever since. After the military trials, the first major trial was of Nazi doctors, in 1947, resulting in the Nuremberg Code, with its application to health law. In 1949, the Geneva Conventions, with their human rights provisions, were revised and added to.

Annas says that metaphors are commonly used to help us understand any number of things. He had previously used the star metaphor for health law (a giant red star expanding, then becoming a white dwarf), only in the opposite way — health law started small and is constantly expanding. Health law is an area of living and life, he says. Bioethics covers what should be done (the doctor-patient relationship), health law is made by state (what’s required), and human rights is global, species level, and treaty-based. What’s a metaphor for these three fields, he asks. A common metaphor is a tree, with roots, branches, trunk, and fruits, but he has come to believe that it’s the wrong metaphor. A better metaphor is a web or a series of interconnected webs made by three spiders (health law, bioethics, human rights), overlapping, working together, and informed by the medical field. Although he also mentions the metaphor of a shipwreck, at present he thinks the web metaphor works best. A question-and-answer session follows.

The annual Pike Conference is held to honor Neal Pike (LAW’37), a distinguished lawyer and lifelong advocate for individuals with disabilities.

March 24, 2008, 3 p.m.
George Sherman Union

Video length is 00:53:54.

About the Speakers:
George J. Annas is an expert in health and human rights, patient ethics, and medical ethics. He is the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights and chair of the School of Public Health’s department of health law, bioethics, and human rights. He is also a professor of law at the School of Law and a professor of sociomedical sciences and community medicine at the School of Medicine. He is a cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working to promote human rights and health, and is the author or editor of 16 books on health law and bioethics.

Wendy K. Mariner, an internationally recognized authority in health law, is a School of Public Health professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights, as well as a professor of law at the School of Law and a professor of sociomedical sciences and community medicine at the School of Medicine. Her research and teaching focus on health insurance, ERISA, public health, emergency preparedness, and research with human subjects, and she has published more than 100 articles in the legal, medical, and health policy literature.

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