Alicia Ely Yamin

Legal scholar and human rights practitioner whose work has shaped the field of the right to health from the accountability side: how the right becomes justiciable, how courts have handled claims of health rights violations, and how institutional design can either enable or defeat the practice of the right. Commissioner of the Lancet Commission on Global Governance for Health 2.0.

Her recent work includes a 2024 article in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (with Bottini Filho and Gianella Malca) and a 2025 article in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics titled Suffering, Power and Courts, which examines the political theory beneath judicial responses to structural health injustice.

Why she matters here

Yamin’s argument is the direct legal counterpart to what this resource proposes on the biomedical side: that a right that is not enforceable and not accompanied by an account of how to hold power to answer is not a right in practice, and that the failure to design accountability is not incidental, it is constitutive.