The Judicialization of the Right to Health in Brazil

Professor João Biehl visited Yale on February 28, 2019 as part of the Health Justice Speaker Series.

João Biehl, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Associate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and co-director of the Global Health Program and of the Brazil LAB (Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies), visited Yale on Feb. 28, 2019 to discuss “The Judicialization of the Right to Health in Brazil: Enacting Magical Legalism and Prospecting Biopolitical Futurity.” 

His talk, which was part of the Health Justice Speaker Series, explored grassroots mobilizations for the right-to-health and for state accountability in Brazil, against the backdrop of an expanding pharmaceuticalization of care. Contrary to notions of ‘the end of human rights,’ patients and legal activists are litigating for access to medicines and are rallying for effective infrastructures. As people enact ‘magical legalism’ and affirm an otherwise, they create the conditions of biopolitical futurity.

Watch a video recording of the talk.

The event was organized by the Yale Global Health Studies Program and Yale Global Health Justice Partnership and co-sponsored by the Yale Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies; Yale Anthropology Department; Schell Center for International Human Rights; YSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Yale Sociology Department; Solomon Center for Health Law & Policy. It is funded in part by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School.