Telling stories about European Union Health Law: The emergence of a new field of law

Abstract:

The ideational narrative power of law has now solidified, and continues to solidify, ‘European Union health law’, into an entity with a distinctive legal identity.

EU health law was previously seen as either non-existent, or so broad as to be meaningless, or as existing only in relations between EU law and health (the ‘and’ approach), or as consisting of a body of barely or loosely connected policy domains (the ‘patchwork’ approach).

The process of bringing EU health law into being is a process of narration. The ways in which EU health law is narrated (and continues to be narrated) involve three main groups of actors: the legislature, courts and the academy.