Law, Leadership, and Legitimacy in a Time of Disease

• Main Author: Coglianese, Cary
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Penn Carey Law: Legal Scholarship Repository 2020
• Subjects: International; Administrative Law; COVID-19; Health Care; International law; Law; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/regreview-opinion/363; https://www.theregreview.org/2020/07/06/coglianese-law-leadership-legitimacy-time-disease/

About four months ago, the world went still—at least as still as ever in modern history. With the global spread of a novel coronavirus, people around the world started sheltering in place—sometimes of their own accord, but more often by the command of their governments. Confronted with a viral breakout of unprecedented proportions in modern history, the editors of The Regulatory Review announced a special series of essays tracking and analyzing regulatory responses to the pandemic from around the world. For the last three months, The Review has every week published new essays by leading scholars and practitioners on the measures that 25 different governments have put in place in response to the COVID-19 crisis. All told, The Review has published 40 essays in this series, covering legal responses on every continent (save Antarctica) as well as developments at international bodies such as the World Health Organization and the European Union. This series is more extensive than any other in The Review’s ten-year history. It brings together, like no other publication has, an impressive array of scholarly perspectives on legal responses to COVID-19 from around the world. The Review’s formal completion of this unparalleled series hardly means that the issues it raises have been left behind. On the contrary, the global pandemic still rages, cases of COVID-19 continue to surge—including in the United States,—and the pandemic’s devastating public health and economic effects still plague our societies. As a result, the kinds of governmental responses and legal issues that this series has chronicled remain both relevant and deserving of greater understanding. National, state, and local governments continue to grapple with regulatory changes, especially as many countries try to reopen their economies in what seems at present to be a quixotic quest for some semblance of normality. Given the virus’s persistence, I can say with certainty that, even though this series has formally come to an end, The Regulatory Review’s coverage ...