Reimagining international law to address global health challenges.

Summary This dissertation presents three studies that take a fresh look at the definition and role of international law in addressing transnational health threats and social inequities. The first chapter assesses the capacity of traditional international law to promote global health, with a particular focus on when and why international health treaties may be useful. A synthesis of 90 quantitative impact assessments of past treaties was conducted and an analytical framework was developed. The second chapter builds on this work to assess a wide range of possibilities for working toward collective global action on antimicrobial resistance, including those that involve building institutions, designing incentives, and mobilizing interests. This chapter argues that their real-world impact depends on strong accountability relationships. The third chapter takes this thesis beyond traditional Westphalian notions of collective action by addressing the question of whether new disruptive technologies can theoretically produce the same regulatory effects on global health issues as international laws negotiated by states. First, this chapter presents a relatively simple machine learning model that automatically quantifies the relevance, scientific quality, and sensationalism of articles and validates this model using a corpus of 163,433 news articles mentioning the recent SARS and H1N1 pandemics.