Global legal epidemiology (GLE) is an emerging scientific field that studies how international laws, policies, and norms affect health around the world. It helps explain how global rules and agreements can impact health, equity, and well-being across countries, even when they are not directly written into national law.

The Global Strategy Lab has contributed two open-access studies to help define and advance this field. In 2023, Principles and methods of global legal epidemiology outlined why GLE matters and how it differs from studying law within a single country. It described the pathways through which international laws, policies, and norms can influence health, including by informing political priorities, public expectations, advocacy, and collective action. It also set out key research approaches and questions to support wider use of GLE. 

In 2026, the article Overcoming Challenges to Conducting Global Legal Epidemiology Research examined the practical challenges of conducting GLE research at a global scale. Drawing on case studies, it identified challenges and practical solutions to differences in how countries report data, varied understandings of what it means to follow an international agreement, and the difficulty of measuring global impacts when there is no clear control group.  

GLE’s interdisciplinary research team leverages economic modelling, epidemiology, and policy evaluation to evaluate the effectiveness of international legal mechanisms and generate evidence in support of the development of future treaties.