Canadian and international scholars met at a conference on Global Health Challenges and the Role of Law in Toronto on May 4-5, 2012 and presented papers
in five different clusters: Global Health and Chronic Diseases; Global Health and Vulnerable Populations; Global Health and Human Rights; Globalization, Pharmaceuticals, and Free Trade; and Globalization and Global Trade in Bodies and Services. We asked participants to explore the various ways in which law3 functions (or malfunctions) as a tool for reform in global health, and more broadly, the interactions between law and other mechanisms of global health governance. Not all papers provide explicit answers to these questions. But they all reflect on either the value of legal intervention, or the limits of law in providing solutions, or the complex ways in which law interacts with other normative systems and socio-economic practices and transactions.