The combined effects of the coronavirus and government-imposed shutdowns have cost the US economy an enormous amount of money—perhaps trillions of dollars—and we still aren’t out of the woods yet. But a year into the virus, there still isn’t a clear answer to a very basic question: who is going to pay for all of […]
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Vaccines are here, but not for everyone
The race to vaccinate the world against Covid-19 is on. Though Americans may be lamenting that they have to wait a few more weeks to get their dose, the delay may be much longer for most people around the world. Even before approval, three vaccines—AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer—had been gobbled up by wealthy governments across […]
Elderly Plaintiffs Caught in the Fray of PREP Act Immunity
As of February 2, 2021, over one-third of U.S. COVID-19 deaths and five-percent of all U.S. COVID-19 cases are linked nursing homes. Unsurprisingly, over fifty-five negligence and wrongful death claims related to COVID-19 have been filed against assisted living facilities in state courts across the country in recent months. The claims are as repetitive as […]
Maintaining Child Welfare During COVID-19
When the pandemic began, states across the U.S. witnessed between a twenty to seventy percent decline in reported cases of child abuse and neglect. However, this is not good news. In fact, it is downright alarming. Indeed, this decrease in reported cases is not because child abuse and neglect have decreased. Rather, the consensus is […]
How to Launch a Digital Contact Tracing Application: Key Legal Considerations
As previously suggested in Digital Contact Tracing: Hope or Hype?, digital contact tracing, if implemented successfully, can help to control the spread of COVID-19. But the government is not a tech company. Therefore, no state has undertaken an effort to independently develop a digital instrument to conduct contact tracing. Instead, the private sector has underpinned […]
Staying-at-Home When the Home is Unsafe: The Impact of COVID-19 on Survivors of Domestic Violence (Part 2)
This is the second part of a two-part series about the impact of COVID-19 on survivors of domestic violence. Part 1 discussed the surge in domestic violence during the pandemic, new challenges for domestic violence prevention nonprofits, and the federal government’s response. Part 2 will examine the impact of COVID-19 on domestic violence survivors in […]
Staying-at-Home When the Home is Unsafe: The Impact of COVID-19 on Survivors of Domestic Violence (Part 1)
While stay-at-home orders are meant to protect Americans, they can also prove deadly for those facing domestic violence. Under these orders, survivors of domestic violence find themselves confined with their abusers, stripped of support resources, and overlooked by the federal and state governments. This article is the first part of a two-part series about the […]
Protecting Public Health Will Require a Culture Shift Alongside Legal Change
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 […]
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 […]