How Law Facilitated Pharmaceutical Fraud and How It Could Save Us
The McGill Research Group on Health and Law (RGHL) is pleased to invite you to its 2015 Annual Lecture on Health and Law with Trudo Lemmens, Professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
Abstract
Since Thalidomide, the legal regime introduced to improve pharmaceutical product safety and efficacy has generated new administrative, industrial and scientific practices. These practices, in combination with a host of social, cultural and scientific developments, including the emphasis on evidence-based medicine, have strengthened industry’s grip over pharmaceutical knowledge production. Statutory law and regulation have thereby facilitated fraud and misrepresentation, while industry’s growing control over scientific knowledge has also undermined the integrity of traditional tort mechanisms that could offer compensation to those affected by these practices. Professor Lemmens will discuss these developments and briefly explore the strength and limits of some legal tools aimed at curbing this trend, paying particular attention to recent legal skirmishes related to transparency and access to data. Considering the central role of scientific knowledge and the impact of health care products on physical and mental integrity, he will argue that states have a human rights obligation to strengthen independent scientific knowledge production.
Biography
Trudo Lemmens is Professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, with cross appointments in the Faculty of Medicine and the Joint Centre for Bioethics. He holds a Licentiate in Law from the K.U.Leuven (Belgium) and both an LLM (bioethics) and Doctorate in Law (DCL) from McGill University. Since joining the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, he has been a member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a visiting fellow of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, a visiting professor at the K.U.Leuven, the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies, a Plumer Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s St. Anne’s College, and an academic visitor of Oxford University's HeLEX Center for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies. He has been a member of various provincial, national and international committees, and is currently a member of the Advisory Committee on Health Research of the Pan American Health Organization and of the Board of the Ontario Mental Health Foundation.
His research and teaching is situated at the interface of law, ethics, and professional governance. His current research focuses on the complex interaction between law, governance mechanisms, and ethical norms and values in the context of health care, biomedical research, health product development, and--more generally--knowledge production.
A request for accreditation as a continuing legal education activity has been made to the Barreau du Québec.
Kindly RSVP to rghl [dot] law [at] mcgill [dot] ca.