Researching Law Fall 2020 - Flipbook - Page 4
R ESEA RC HI N G L AW
Would Better Law
Mean Less COVID?
For years, both specialists and
the public have worried about
global pandemics and the death,
disability, and general chaos that
would come with them. With
each new infectious disease,
experts have become increasingly
concerned that the world,
especially the United States, was
not adequately prepared.
Pandemics raise unique questions
about what the law can do
to mitigate the effects of a
biologically based crisis that might
seem beyond the law’s reach.
Although some public health
governance elements, such as the
International Health Regulations
(IHR), have been strengthened
Carol Heimer
4
in recent years, COVID-19 has
made the limitations of current
legal structures painfully and often
fatally apparent. But what can we
do to enhance the legal tools for
protecting public health in the face
of present and future epidemics?
The Fellows of the American
Bar Foundation recently hosted
a virtual seminar, soon after the
American Bar Association (ABA)
Annual Meeting, that examined
the root of how public health law
confronts a pandemic. This
seminar was anchored by a
research presentation by Carol
Heimer, ABF Research Professor
and Northwestern University
Professor of Sociology.
For the past decade and a half,
Heimer has been conducting
research in HIV clinics in Uganda,
South Africa, Thailand, and the
United States. Her work, studying
the relationship between law and
infectious diseases, is of enormous
relevance during COVID-19. She
has investigated what happens
when laws, regulations, and
guidelines, created with the
best of intentions, increasingly
organize medical work and are
also transported to new sites
within developing countries. Her
work exposes the gap between
the intention of the law and the
application on the ground in
confronting the realities of medical
care and healthcare administration.
“All too often, we think the threat
of these pestilences lies in the
domain of the biological sciences
and medicine, and that law can’t
have a great deal to do with it,”
said Heimer. “I’m suggesting that
the social arrangements we use
to deal with these situations are
critical to the outcomes.”
“Unfortunately, I’m suggesting that
just as there is work to be done in
the realms of medicine and biology,
we have a lot of work to do in
the realm of law and other kinds
of social arrangements to deal
successfully with the pandemic and
other diseases.”
The Legal Environment of
Pandemics
The legal environment of
pandemics and public health is
complex. Global health governance
is simultaneously distinct and
interlinked with domestic law,
which includes actions within
the federal, state, and local