Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19.

• Author: Kapp, Marshall B.
• Position: Book review

The field of public or population health often has received inadequate political, social, and economic attention in the past, but the advent in the year 2020 of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly has thrust this previously underappreciated component of the societal universe onto center stage. In the United States and elsewhere, the law always has been a fundamental weapon (some would argue the prime tool) in the public health armamentarium. In this new publication, produced by the consortium Public Health Law Watch and available for free at https://www.publichealthlaw-watch.org/covid19-policy-playbook, 50 of the nation's most prominent public health law scholars and activists have joined to take advantage of the current crisis to make sure the role of law and lawyers garners, nay dominates, its share of the spotlight.

Legal academicians, and a fortiori those who concentrate on public health law, almost invariably believe that the answer to every human problem is the promulgation of more voluminous and comprehensive regulation more vigorously enforced by government agencies and private litigation, with perhaps some (or much) additional government spending mixed in for good measure. Thus, it is unsurprising that the mission reflected in this book is retrospective, but constructive criticism of our political leaders for not being legally aggressive enough in anticipation of a public health emergency such as COVID-19. The scolding presented here consists of the enumeration and explanation of more than 100 exhaustively detailed recommendations for specific legal actions, for the most part of the command-and-control rule type, addressed mainly to legislatures and executive departments at the national, state, local, and tribal levels, all intended to remedy the pervasive litany of legal and political derelictions of duty that...