The new Journal of Global Health Law: cracking the foundations of the field

The new Journal of Global Health Law: cracking the foundations of the field We, the editors, are excited to launch the new Journal of Global Health Law.We see real momentum for the journal, with many international lawyers focussing on this important and challenging field.In the following lines, we briefly lay out the background against which this initiative emerges, as well as our vision for the direction of the journal in the years to come.Global health law has steadily developed since the early 2000s as a complex, increasingly vibrant and sometimes bewildering field of study.For legal scholars, the small number of international treaties with the core object and purpose of protecting global health pose particular interest.The conventions and regulations adopted under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) are central.The field is wider, however, stretching to include environmental law treaties, human rights treaties, the occupational health standards of the International Labour Organization and the United Nations drug control treaties.Clearly, these treaties are not coherent, there is much fragmentation and they are furthermore limited in terms of scope and enforcement mechanisms.Lastly, the creation of new instruments of global health law tends to be a very long and costly process.The emergence of global health law coincided with a shift from 'international' to 'global' health, which offered, first, a broader conceptual framework for addressing cross-border health issues not limited to communicable diseases; and second, the inclusion of actors other than governments and intergovernmental organizations. 1 In the early 1990s, sparse references to global health law were made in international scholarship.Scholars like Allyn Taylor laid a path for future work, arguing in domestic law journals for the WHO to adopt treaties following its law-making powers. 2 Already in the 1990s, David Fidler began to develop a definition of global health law, focussing on the WHO. 3 Fidler was furthermore central to the development of the study of the role of international law and the spread of infectious diseases. 4