The issue contains two papers that focus on legal governance of chronic diseases. Bryan Thomas and Lawrence Gostin clearly take a very different stance than William Bogart on the ability of law to effectively deal with the challenge of chronic diseases. While Thomas and Gostin defend an approach based on the simultaneous embracing of a wide variety of strategies in both national and international law, Bogart reflects skeptically on the law’s ability to effectively combat obesity. Thomas and Gostin support the use of restrictive regulations on labelling, food additives, and advertising, but also acknowledge the need to incentivise industry and individual consumers to change behavior. They emphasize, as Gostin has done in earlier publications, that domestic strategies require the support of global governance mechanisms which, to be effective, require specific compliance mechanisms. They also indicate that effective strategies have built on engagement with industry and civil society. Bog- art reflects more critically on existing legal tools to combat obesity. He challenges current public health policies first for failing to be clear about the nature of the public health problem: is the problem purely one of the high incidence of overweight people — Bogart
provocatively uses the term “fat” — or is it the absence of healthy living and exercise? He also suggests that the dominant “public health” approach — focusing on weight loss and self-control — results in stigmatization and discrimination, while failing to provide an effective remedy. Legal interventions may, according to Bogart, only play a limited role in the promotion of public health. A less zealous focus on healthy living, he argues, should guide legal interventions in this area.