Dr. Anthony Fauci has noted that Australia had the fewest number of flu cases “in memory” during its winter flu season this year. He explained, “The theory is that all the precautions they took to contain the pandemic ‘averted a flu season.’” Australia had slightly more than 21,000 flu cases and only thirty-six deaths during […]
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Stay-at-Home Orders and Religious Freedom: How Courts Balance the Free Exercise Clause and State Emergency Powers
In the wake of the initial impact of COVID-19, state governments rushed to respond to breakouts. The resulting executive orders led to widespread shutdowns that attempted to balance the reduction of contact between people and the institutions needed to sustain the population . While at first many accepted the necessary shutdowns, it didn’t take long […]
Contracts in the Age of COVID-19: A Look At Force Majeure Clauses
As businesses continue to confront the harsh economic realities of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, many are looking for legal solutions to cut costs and stay afloat. Even as consumer spending has increased over the past few months, evidence of recovery is mixed at best. As such, many businesses and consumers have been revisiting contracts to […]
Election Litigation in the Era of COVID-19
The 2020 Presidential election promises to be unlike any in history. The country is still in the midst of a global pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of more than 220,000 people nationwide and created the worst economic recession in recent history. As of October 25, 2020, forty-six states still have some COVID-related restrictions […]
A Critical Analysis of the International Response to COVID-19: Reflections from Colombia
In the face of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, questions of resource allocation, information access, aseptisation, and biopolitics that were once reserved for the poor and remote are made plausible realities for the Western, postmodern city-dweller. In response, spheres of society have put forth various monodisciplinary “solutions” to stem the spread of COVID-19 and the ensuing economic […]
COVID-19 in Rural America and the Indian Nations: Refocusing Development to Support At-Risk Communities
For many, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to conjure scenes of once-bustling urban centers grinding to a halt. However, for the one in five Americans that live in rural communities, the reality of the pandemic has been markedly different from that of its metropolitan neighbors. The combination of insufficient resources and a particularly vulnerable population […]
Pandemic Property: What Covid-19 Taught Us about Housing Law
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light longstanding problems in housing law. This sudden emergency has exposed systemic deficiencies in our property law system. Those flaws have long left human beings vulnerable to deprivation and hardship, but now they leave millions more people susceptible to imminent catastrophic decline in their economic wellbeing. Worse still, these […]
Digital Contact Tracing: Hope or Hype?
In prior pandemics, manual contact tracing has been key to slow the spread. Contact tracing entails conducting interviews with infected patients to identify with whom they might have been in contact, so those individuals could be notified and quarantined. Smartphones make it technically possible to digitally trace contacts made with someone infected with coronavirus. Much […]