Carol A. Heimer: Governing the Global Clinic: The Peril and Promise of the Legal Transformation of Medicine

Department Colloquium - presentation by Carol A. Heimer, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Northwestern University and Editor, Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

Carol A. Heimer is Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Professor Emerita of Sociology at Northwestern University, and editor of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.  Her recent research focuses on the boundaries between law and other arenas, and asks especially about the effects of introducing legalized accountability.  In addition to her book, Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine, her recent publications discuss pandemics and law (Annual Review of Law and Social Science), clinic-level rights to healthcare (Law and Society Review), the durability of regulation (Regulation and Governance), and the relationship between law and morality (Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, vol. 2).  She is currently completing several papers on distrust and disrespect in regulatory systems.

Abstract: 
HIV emerged at a time when medicine and healthcare were becoming more globalized and shifting to legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things.  It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements — and law in particular — are also crucial in shaping outcomes.  Drawing on observations and interviews in five clinics in the US, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, and in the larger world of HIV treatment and research, this study examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems.  Although law’s aspirations may have been noble, the legalization of healthcare has brought both negatives, such as rigid compliance bureaucracies, and positives, including some rethinking of what clinic staff owe their patients and research subjects.