Legal Precedents

As COVID-19 continues its assault on the country, residents in more than 10 states have been ordered to stay home and businesses, including restaurants, health clubs and entire malls, have been closed as governors nationwide take extraordinary steps in an effort to protect public health. Under what legal authority do such orders fall – and are there legal limits on government actions during a health emergency?

As drugmakers race to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, several legal questions are emerging: could the government require people to get it? Could people who refuse to roll up their sleeves get banned from stores or lose their jobs?

The short answer is yes, according to Dov Fox, a law professor and the director of the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at the University of San Diego.

Although lawsuits are a certainty, liability is not. Any lawsuit seeking damages for COVID-19 injuries must surmount several procedural and substantive legal hurdles, says Alston & Bird's Matt Wickersham.

As Covid-19 spreads around the globe, governments have imposed quarantines and travel bans on an unprecedented scale. China locked down whole cities, and Italy has imposed draconian restrictions throughout the country. In the United States, thousands of people have been subjected to legally enforceable quarantines or are in “self-quarantine.”

The article considers a number of legal aspects related to environmental engineering. The levels of legal regulation of this environmental and economic institution are presented.

Counties on the County Monitoring List are under active monitoring by the state, and may receive targeted engagement and technical support from CDPH and other agencies and departments including the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, the Department of Industrial Relations and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Counties that do not demonstrate substantial progress at 14 days are candidates for reinstituting community measures.

After a bit of last-minute legislative maneuvering, the list of propositions that California voters will be asked to weigh in on has been — more or less — finalized.

With a series of temporary protections that helped Californians get through the first few months of the pandemic set to expire soon, Gov. Gavin Newsom hinted he will today extend some programs in another flex of executive power.

Oakland city officials announced legislation today intended to prevent President Trump from sending federal troops to the city — as he threatened to do last week in response to protests — amid heightened concern following Saturday’s demonstration, vandalism and fire to the Alameda County Courthouse.

Because restrictions related to Covid-19 are motivated by community-wide risk and apply to entire populations, legal protections focused on how much risk one person poses to others have little relevance. Moreover, because many restrictions apply to the government’s own institutions (e.g., parks and schools) or are imposed by private actors (e.g., employers), they avoid standard constitutional scrutiny.

President Trump has declared a national emergency along with 50 governors declaring state emergencies (Figure), which are unprecedented actions. Social distancing aims to flatten the epidemic curve to moderate demand on the health system.

This pandemic is not the first, nor will it be the last, pandemic or epidemic to ravage the world. This is the first essay to assess in detail our current pandemic in the context of previous ones, in terms of important medical, policy and legal trends and precedent.

This Essay provides an overview of the litigation that ensued in the wake of some states’ attempts to limit abortion access under the authority of executive orders banning non-essential or elective procedures. It argues that abortion was singled out in two ways that reflect deeper ambivalence about the place of abortion within medicine more generally.

In a moment of scarcity, especially with regard to medical equipment and capacity, the question of who deserves the few available resources becomes front and center. It is in this context that abortion access has been injected into the political and medical response to COVID-19.

As California eases quarantine restrictions and takes steps to reopen, essential businesses face a threat to their operations – predatory lawsuits.

In March 2020, when many U.S. states and localities issued their first emergency orders to address Covid-19, there was widespread acceptance of the government’s legal authority to respond quickly and aggressively to this unprecedented crisis. Today, that acceptance is fraying.

A “CEO tax” targeting San Francisco’s most unequal salaries. A signature-gathering campaign to tax Palo Alto’s millionaires. And now, a new statewide bill that would levy a yearly 0.4 percent tax on every Californian worth more than $30 million.

The spread of the new coronavirus has affected people all over the world, and state and local governments are taking sweeping actions to halt the spread of the disease and mitigate the public health and economic impact of the outbreak.

HLS scholars and legal experts consider the important legal and policy concerns and challenges that have emerged—including those involving civil liberties, privacy, historical precedent, and economic impact—as cities, states and countries respond to the epidemic.