The public health profession uses the term “social determinants of health” to describe the social conditions that combine to influence the health of individuals and communities. These include such measurable elements as education, housing, and economic stability as well as environmental quality, structural racism, and other forms of systemic discrimination, some of which are less quantifiable. In Constitutional Contagion, Wendy Parmet demonstrates that among these elements we also need to include law.
It was a given that legal issues would arise in the course of the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020 governors and mayors almost immediately drew on explicit or assumed legal authority to issue shutdown orders and impose other mitigation measures, even as the public health response became fuel for the country’s political polarization. By mid-2021, barely more than a year into the crisis, more than a thousand lawsuits had been filed against pandemic restrictions and mandates, and the Supreme Court had abruptly reversed itself and begun accepting religious objections to such measures rather than the recommendations of those whose job was to keep the public safe—with major doctrinal consequences that are still unfolding.
Parmet, a law professor at Northeastern University who has written widely on public health, recounts these developments, but her goal is deeper: to illuminate the currents in American legal culture that contributed to what she deems the country’s “catastrophic response” to the pandemic.
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