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This special issue advances understanding of the way in which imaginaries underpin law’s engagement with biomedical technologies and science (technoscience). Broadly speaking, imaginaries in this area can be understood as the shared societal views of the hopes, promises and expectations to be engendered through technoscientific development. However, no single definition of imaginaries underpins the discussions in the articles that comprise this special issue. Instead, the special issue provides space for the application and development of diverse understandings of imaginaries and their roles in law and regulation. In this respect, the special issue builds upon and contributes towards discussion of imaginaries in science and technology studies (STS) and related fields and disciplines. Scholars working in these have pointed to the salience of imaginaries to law (and vice versa). But there has not yet been a distinctly legal account or set of accounts on law and imaginaries. This special issue provides the first sustained attempt to develop such accounts.

This chapter explores how the EU is a largely overlooked exporter of normative power through its facilitation and use of clinical trials data produced abroad for the marketing of safe pharmaceuticals at home; a move that helps to foster the growing resort to pharmaceuticals as a fix for public health problems. This is made possible by the EU’s (de)selection of international ethical frameworks in preference to the international technical standards it co-authors with other global regulators. Clinical trials abroad underscore how ethics are contingent and revisable in light of market needs, producing weak protections for the vulnerable subjects of EU law. I argue that these components and effects of the regime are ultimately about that which undergirds, shapes and directs regulatory design. That is, I point to the use, infiltration, perpetuation and extension of market-oriented ideas, values and rationalities into formally non-market domains like biomedical knowledge production and public health. I explain how these are central to efforts at producing and legitimating the EU, its related imagined socio-political order based on a more innovative, profitable and competitive pharmaceutical sector in order to foster economic growth, jobs and prosperity, and with them the project of European integration. ‘Bioethics as risk’ is highlighted as a way to reshape and redirect the regulatory regime in ways that are more consistent with the spirit and letter of the ethical standards (and through them the human rights) the EU claims to uphold.

On behalf of the Interest Group on Supranational Biolaw of the European Association of Health Law (EAHL IG Biolaw) and the I-BioLex research project (ANR-20-CE26-0007-01), Éloïse Gennet and Aurélie Mahalatchimy have been coordinating, since September 2021, the thematic network on the pharmaceutical strategy on the European Health Policy Platform (EUHPP) of the European Commission. The thematic network of the EAHL IG Biolaw, selected by the European Commission and by the users of the EUHPP platform, is entitled “Health as a fundamental value. Towards an inclusive and equitable pharmaceutical strategy for the European Union”. This network enables to link the EAHL IG Biolaw, exclusively constituted by researchers and academics in the field of health law in Europe, on the one hand with the European Commission and in particular DG Health, and on the other hand with socio-economic actors interested in EU law applicable to medicinal products and medical devices (patient representatives, representatives of health professionals or non-governmental organizations in the field of health). After several months of fruitful exchanges, the final joint statement which was very favorably received by DG Health and endorsed by several organizations (including the President of Aix-Marseille University and the CNRS) has been presented at the EU Health Policy Platform Annual Meeting 2022 at the European Commission and published on the EUHPP in May 2022.

The first law-led collection of papers on imaginaries. This inaugural special issue advances discussion between law and science and technology studies.