I am pleased to introduce this Symposium Edition of The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, which covers a wide variety of issues central to transgender health equity, including Dr. Jamison Green’s recent history of the impact of health policy on transgender communities, Dr. M. Killian Kinney, Ms. Taylor Pearson, and Prof. Julie Ralston Aoki’s transgender equity tool for legal policy analysis, and Prof. Elizabeth Kukura’s analysis of issues facing transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive people during pregnancy and childbirth.

In the wake of COVID-19, the World Health Organization established an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to negotiate a new instrument for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. This special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics brings together multidisciplinary scholarship to address the question of whether antimicrobial resistance should be included in this new instrument. Drawing from disciplines including law, anthropology, history, public health, public policy, economics, and veterinary medicine, this special issue explores the inclusion of AMR within the Pandemic Instrument from three perspectives: first, through the lens of global AMR governance, second, from the perspective of technical governance challenges and opportunities affecting the global ability to address AMR and future pandemics, and third, from the perspective of pandemic instrument mechanisms for strengthening global AMR governance. Each paper makes a concrete recommendation with respect to the importance of including AMR within the scope of the pandemic instrument.

This article introduces a symposium that aims to identify and critically assess the legal strategies of the tobacco, alcohol, and food and beverage industries which rest on freedom of expression arguments.

This special edition of JLME centers on a novel proposal for a national PrEP access program with the potential to break through a failed status quo.

Health justice is both a community-led movement for power building and transformational change and a community-oriented framework for health law scholarship. Health justice is distinguished by a distinctively social ethic of care that reframes the relationship between health care, public health, and the social determinants of health, and names subordination as the root cause of health inequities.

This foreword explores the history of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics and its role in promoting access to care and antiracism.

The U.S. has the tools to end the HIV epidemic, but progress has stagnated. A major gap in U.S. efforts to address HIV is the under-utilization of medications that can virtually eliminate acquisition of the virus, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This document proposes a financing and delivery system to unlock broad access to PrEP for those most vulnerable to HIV acquisition and bring an end to the HIV epidemic.

This article provides a critical and philosophical assessment of arguments invoked for and against the constitutional protection of commercial expression and the regulation of commercial speech with a focus on the commercialization of unhealthy food products.

The sheer gamut of issues impacting transgender health equity may seem overwhelming. This article seeks to introduce readers to the breadth of topics addressed in this symposium edition, exemplifying that transgender health equity is a global issue that demands an interdisciplinary approach.

Governments can practically and efficiently address zoonoses and AMR –– within the text of the new pandemic instrument. We map the overlaps between the efforts needed to address both pandemic threats, including (a) equitable access to medical countermeasures, (b) globally integrated One Health surveillance and monitoring systems, (c) increased technical and laboratory capacity in low- and middle-income countries, and (d) a regulatory framework governing the stewardship of antimicrobials. By outlining potential dual-purpose provisions that could be included in a pandemic instrument, we argue that addressing AMR in the pandemic instrument is practicable, the most effective use of limited time and resources, and provides the best opportunity for future global pandemic readiness.

Law and racism are intertwined, with legal tools bearing the potential to serve as instruments of oppression or equity. This Special Issue explores this dual nature of health law, with attention to policing in the context of mental health, schools, and substance use disorders; industry and the environment in the context of food advertising, tobacco regulation, worker safety, and environmental racism; health care and research in the context of infant mortality, bias in medical applications of AI, and diverse inclusion in research; and anti-racist teaching and practice in the context of building an interprofessional curriculum and medical-legal partnerships.

Although the federal government and several state governments have recognized that structural discrimination limits less privileged groups’ ability to be healthy, the measures adopted to eliminate health disparities do not address structural discrimination. Historical and modern-day structural discrimination in employment has limited racial and ethnic minority individuals’ economic conditions by segregating them to low wage jobs that lack benefits, which has been associated with health disparities. Health justice provides a community-driven approach to transform the government’s efforts to eliminate health disparities, by acknowledging the problem of structural discrimination; empowering less privileged groups to create and implement structural change; and providing support to redress harm.

Preemption is a substantial threat to achieving racial equity. Since 2011, states have increasingly preempted local governments from enacting policies that can improve health and reduce racial inequities such as increasing minimum wage and requiring paid leave.

Health justice seeks, both conceptually and in practice, to strengthen community engagement and empowerment as an integral means of addressing health disparities. In this essay, we explore the nature of communities and their roles in health care/public health. We propose that an ethical principle of respect for communities is a requisite part of health justice. It is this respect for communities that ethically grounds health justice’s calls for greater community engagement and empowerment. Conceptions of health justice, we claim, will gain ethical power and coherence as this principle is more clearly recognized and further developed.