Pharmaceutical Law

Pharmaceutical law deals with key policy, legal, and regulatory matters confronting the pharmaceutical industry today. It involves the process of drug development and manufacture, the marketing process, approval and prohibition of drugs, access to medications, government health care programs, counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals intellectual property matters, legal liability of pharmaceuticals, and many other industry-related activities.

Pharmaceutical policy and its attendant laws and regulations have developed by way of a long, historic process. During the first half of the 19th century, pharmacists and medical doctors considered that medical patenting and the use of trademarks in the drug manufacturing industry was unethical, as it constituted a kind of monopoly. By the second half of the 19th century, shifting ideas about patent and trademark law, and changes to related ...