Podcast: Professor Amy Kapczynski Explains How to Fight for Health and Justice
Since her days as a Yale Law School student, Professor Amy Kapczynski ’03 has been a passionate advocate for global health and justice issues. In this episode of the Inside Yale Law School podcast, Kapczynski sits down with Dean Heather K. Gerken to discuss her work, including how she confronted drug companies — and her own university — over their patent policies on AIDS drugs. She also shares her fascination with intellectual property law and political economy, and why we all need to be kinder to each other.
Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project. She has worked closely with social movements involved in campaigns for access to medicines in the U.S. as well as transnationally, and more recently as part of a coalition calling for a Community Health Corps to combat COVID-19.
Fighting for life-saving AIDS drugs (0:53)
As a first-year law student, Kapczynski led a campaign to get Yale University and Bristol Myers Squibb to change their patent policies to make AIDS drugs more affordable in sub-Saharan Africa. She describes the start of the effort:
“Yale held the patents on some of these drugs, on one of these drugs in particular, a drug called D4T. And Yale had licensed it to Bristol Myers Squibb. And I knew, as a student, that there were many people who worked for the university because they cared deeply about the public interest. And that people like the scientists who work here would not have been happy with this situation.”
Read more:
2001 Salon article on Kapczynski's work as a law student on AIDS drugs: “Amy and Goliath”
Why everything is connected to political economy (11:47)
Kapczynski discusses her interdisciplinary work on law and political economy:
“If you’re thinking about climate change, or you’re thinking about inequality and the Occupy movement or the financial crisis, or you’re thinking about racialized dispossession and housing, and how can we build housing for all? Those are all questions of political economy that you really need to be able to get into from more perspectives, with more values in hand, than I think many of us were taught to think about the economy with.”
Related:
Law and Political Economy Blog
Why paid sick leave shouldn’t be controversial (23:11)
Kapczynski discusses how the lack of paid sick leave and other social support for people to stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to polarization:
“One of the things I’ve seen and feel very deeply about COVID is that the lack of caring infrastructure actually is part of the political polarization and the real anger that people had with public health in the long run. Because we didn’t support people. We ended up telling them what to do more than we supported them to do the right thing, and I think that was a real problem.”
Related:
In this Boston Review article co-authored with Gregg Gonsalves, Kapczynski argues for a “New Deal” for public health to respond to the COVID pandemic:
