Associated Fellows

Professor John Harrington

John Harrington is Professor of Law at the University of Liverpool and Senior Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa from 2010. His research focuses on the interaction of law and medicine as systems of knowledge and practice, paying particular attention to the broader political and economic context of this relationship.He has published on the effect of economic liberalizataion on the regulation of the medical profession in Tanzania and on the human right to health in the context of globalization, as well as on legal aspects of the reform of Britain’s National Health Service and on the role of criminal law in infectious disease control.

John has been a research fellow at the Universities of Dar es Salaam and Cape Town, at the Wissenschaftszentrum fuer Sozialforschung in Berlin and the Institute of Health, University of Warwick (UK). He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence in 2001-2 and has been director of Liverpool University’s Institute of Medicine Law and Bioethics (2006-10). He has pioneered teaching and research on Global Health Law in the United Kingdom.

During his time at the Institute John will work on two main projects. The first considers the implications of global health governance for the provision of health care in Eastern Africa. The last decade has seen a huge increase in regulatory activity in relation to health at international, regional and national levels. The World Health Organization has shaken off earlier constraints to develop two key international legal instruments, the revised International Health Regulations and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The human right to health embodied in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has been the focus of authoritative scholarly elaboration and practical implementation in many national legal systems and at the international level.

These normative developments are matched by an increasing globalization of health issues, in the sense that cross-border activities (of NGOs and multinational corporations) significantly affect the health prospects and the human rights of citizens in developing countries. The outsourcing of clinical trials to resource-poor areas and the enforcement of intellectual property rights over essential medicines are two prominent examples. International developments in health governance have been closely studied by lawyers, political scientists and public health specialists. Less attention has been devoted to the outworkings of these developments at national and sub-national level.

John’s project takes up this challenge, examining the way in which global health governance has been conceptualised, contested and realised in law in Eastern Africa. It takes a cross-cutting approach, focussing on specific thematic issues such as the tobacco control, access to essential medicines, the conduct of medical research and the out-migration of health workers. As well as offering insights into the workings of global health governance it will also contribute to our broader understanding of the state under neo-liberal globalization.

The second project is a historical study of the development of legal education in African states during the immediate post-independence period. This project, carried out with Dr Ambreena Manji of Keele University has already lead to two publications: on Lord Denning and African Legal Education, and on the development of African Law teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Further papers on conflicts over legal education in Ghana and in Tanzania are currently in progress.