{"title":"Health Law and Democracy.","authors":"Wendy K Mariner","doi":"10.1017/amj.2025.4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Current political divisions are destabilizing existing laws affecting the health field. Major changes in the field of health law have one thing in common: changes in who holds political power ‒ Congress and state legislatures, governors, presidents, judges, and agency officials. The laws that structure financial, economic, educational, and health care systems, environmental conditions, and civil society are primarily the product of elections that populate our political institutions. These structural determinants of health in turn create laws that influence how ‒ and how well ‒ we live and whether our society functions fairly under the rule of law. Thus, who gets elected matters a great deal to the health and safety of Americans. At the same time, changes in health laws resulting from elections may reveal shifts in the structures underlying our legal and economic systems and whether those shifts support or weaken principles of justice and the rule of law.</p>","PeriodicalId":7680,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Law & Medicine","volume":"50 3-4","pages":"180-190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Journal of Law & Medicine","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/amj.2025.4","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/3/24 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Current political divisions are destabilizing existing laws affecting the health field. Major changes in the field of health law have one thing in common: changes in who holds political power ‒ Congress and state legislatures, governors, presidents, judges, and agency officials. The laws that structure financial, economic, educational, and health care systems, environmental conditions, and civil society are primarily the product of elections that populate our political institutions. These structural determinants of health in turn create laws that influence how ‒ and how well ‒ we live and whether our society functions fairly under the rule of law. Thus, who gets elected matters a great deal to the health and safety of Americans. At the same time, changes in health laws resulting from elections may reveal shifts in the structures underlying our legal and economic systems and whether those shifts support or weaken principles of justice and the rule of law.
期刊介绍:
desde Enero 2004 Último Numero: Octubre 2008 AJLM will solicit blind comments from expert peer reviewers, including faculty members of our editorial board, as well as from other preeminent health law and public policy academics and professionals from across the country and around the world.