Constitutional law has helped make Americans unhealthy. Drawing from law, history, political theory, and public health research, Constitutional Contagion explores the history of public health laws, the nature of liberty and individual rights, and the forces that make a nation more or less vulnerable to contagion. In this groundbreaking work, Wendy Parmet documents how the Supreme Court departed from past practice to stymie efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrates how pre-pandemic court decisions helped to shatter social contracts, weaken democracy, and perpetuate the inequities that made the United States especially vulnerable when COVID-19 struck. Looking at judicial decisions from an earlier era, Parmet argues that the Constitution does not compel the stark individualism and disregard of public health that is evident in contemporary constitutional law decisions. Parmet shows us why, if we are to be a healthy nation, constitutional law must change.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented governance challenge, with governments resorting to very different (legal) strategies to respond to the health emergency. A rich literature is already dedicated to measures adopted in individual States. This article adds an original comparative contribution to that literature by exploring the influence of specific constitutional features on the legal response to the pandemic and how, in turn, these responses have the potential to reconfigure the institutional frameworks in place. Our analysis shows that both constitutional contexts and legal traditions significantly matter in pandemic times, in particular when it comes to the rule of law credentials of measures adopted. We focus our study on measures taken during first six months of the pandemic (the “first wave”) in four European jurisdictions with significantly different constitutional settlements; namely France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Following a contextual approach, the comparative analysis concentrates on four macro-issues: 1) the legal bases of adopted measures; 2) the horizontal allocation of power; 3) the vertical allocation of power; and 4) the role of the judiciary, especially in terms of fundamental rights protection. Across all four analytical categories, constitutional and institutional factors - such as the respective forms of government, vertical power conflicts, presence of pre-existing emergency schemes or legal doctrines, and the structure of the judicial systems - significantly impacted the (legal) path taken in the four jurisdictions under scrutiny and, importantly, reinforced pre-existing patterns of institutional shifts or social and political tensions. In particular, the role of two institutional features generally overlooked in the literature on the matter emerged: the concrete functioning of the vertical allocation of power and the reciprocal relationships between different jursdictions within judicial systems. By these means, this article aims to broaden and enrich the analytical toolkit of the literature concerning the relationship between states of emergency and specific forms of constitutional government and State.

Sixty percent of infectious human diseases are shared with other vertebrates. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode tell how innovations to combat livestock infections—border control, food inspection, drug regulation, federal research labs—turned the U.S. into a world leader in combatting communicable diseases, and remain central to public health policy.

During the Antebellum era, thousands of free black sailors were arrested for violating the Negro Seamen Acts. In retelling the harrowing experiences of free black sailors, Moral Contagion highlights the central roles that race and international diplomacy played in the development of American citizenship.

A concise history of how American law has shaped—and been shaped by—the experience of contagion“Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt’s legal survey a fascinating resource”—Kirkus, starred review “Professor Witt’s book is an original and thoughtful contribution to the interdisciplinary study of disease and American law. Although he covers the broad sweep of the American experience of epidemics from yellow fever to COVID-19, he is especially timely in his exploration of the legal background to the current disaster of the American response to the coronavirus. A thought-provoking, readable, and important work.”—Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history’s answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?

A new constitutional order has replaced the New Deal in recent years, argues Mark Tushnet, which is characterised by divided government, ideologically organised parties & chastened constitutional ambition. He looks at how the new order works & explores the principles upon which it is founded.

Is the world facing a serious threat to the protection of constitutional democracy? There is a genuine debate about the meaning of the various political events that have, for many scholars and observers, generated a feeling of deep foreboding about our collective futures all over the world. Do these events represent simply the normal ebb and flow of political possibilities, or do they instead portend a more permanent move away from constitutional democracy that had been thought triumphant after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989? Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? addresses these questions head-on: Are the forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world general or nation-specific? Why have some major democracies seemingly not experienced these problems? How can we as scholars and citizens think clearly about the ideas of "constitutional crisis" or "constitutional degeneration"? What are the impacts of forces such as globalization, immigration, income inequality, populism, nationalism, religious sectarianism? Bringing together leading scholars to engage critically with the crises facing constitutional democracies in the 21st century, these essays diagnose the causes of the present afflictions in regimes, regions, and across the globe, believing at this stage that diagnosis is of central importance - as Abraham Lincoln said in his "House Divided" speech, "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it."

Presser makes a compelling case that the original understanding of the Constitution was that religion, morality, and law were inextricably connected.--Forrest McDonald