Transnational Legal Ordering and Access to Medicines

The politics of pharmaceutical patent protection increasingly involves the interaction of different transnational legal orders (TLOs). Two of these, a TLO focused on trade and intellectual property protection and a TLO focused on the human right to health, have interacted to frame and shape countries’ approaches to intellectual property protection. These rival transnational legal orders involve recursive interaction between legal norm-making and implementation at the international and national levels. This chapter argues that understanding the operation and interaction of these TLOs provides an important framework for countries to develop strategies to navigate among the multiple pressures placed upon them