Book Talk: When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality

When Misfortune Becomes Injustice (Stanford University Press, February 2020) surveys the progress and challenges faced in deploying human rights to advance health and social equality over the last 30 years, with a particular focus on women’s health and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Author and Petrie-Flom Center senior fellow Alicia Ely Yamin weaves together firsthand experience as an academic, practitioner, and advocate, with arguments drawn from law, public health, economics and democratic theory, to explore how evolving international and national legal norms, the advent of medical and technological discoveries, and economic policies have interacted in the realization of health-related rights.

At this event, Yamin will be joined by expert panelists to discuss both the progresses and the challenges that she describes in the book, as well as her proposals for a re-energized human rights praxis.

Panelists
Alicia Ely Yamin, senior fellow, The Petrie-Flom Center

Sue Goldie, Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health and director, Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health; director, Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University

Michael Ashley Stein, executive director, Harvard Law School Project on Disability; Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School

Lucie White, Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law, Harvard Law School