Keywords
Health's Judicialization
Liberalism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17566/ciads.v10i1.759How to Cite
Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to speculate on the reasons why the health legal literature has not focused more incisively on the most remote causes of the phenomenon of the health's judicialization and how this is directly related to the current democratic crisis. It is asserted that the concept of democracy supported by the legal health doctrine is a derivation of the idealized concept of democracy of liberalism, as it naively underestimates the degeneration of democracy in lobby and ignores the empirical studies of contemporary political science that point to the disinterest and the passionate behavior of citizens regarding public affairs. Furthermore, in praising an alleged democratic exercise via health lawsuits, health legal doctrine pays little attention to alternative explanations of the origin of the judicialization of politics, such as that offered by Ran Hirschl, who sustains that the increasing judicialization (juristrocracy) stems from a strategic agreement between the economic, political and legal elites for the hegemonic preservation of their interests and for the advancement of a neoliberal economic agenda. It is supported the hypothesis that the omission of the sanitary legal doctrine in regard to deeper explanations about the judicialization of politics is exactly related to this preservation of the interests of the legal elite. For this reason, in order to advance in the improvement of democracy, it is necessary to reflect on the structural causes of judicialization, and thus promote institutional reforms that mitigate both the influence of economic power in politics and the mechanisms of production of judicial activism.
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