Author Archives: Lisa Forman

About Lisa Forman

Lisa Forman is a South African human rights lawyer and international human rights law scholar whose research explores the contribution of the right to health in international law to remediating global health inequities. She holds a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Human Rights and Global Health Equity. Her research focuses on the utility of human rights in advancing global health equity.

Is the Right to Medicines a Canary in the Human Rights Coalmine?

This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Introduction Amy Kapczynski’s article presciently points out the weaknesses of the judicialization of the right to medicines, and its failure “to engage a foundational aspect of [these cases]: the political economy of medicines that they assume.”[1] Kapczynski argues that these cases suggest that a right to medicines “imbricated” within the prevailing neoliberal regime is plausibly regressive: Continue reading →