Law Commons^™

God, Guns, And Hair Salons: Public Perceptions Of Rights And Liberties During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Jessica R. Graham, Kyle J. Morgan

West Virginia Law Review

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, elected officials across the United States took efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Some of these efforts raised constitutional questions about the ability of the government to curtail rights during a crisis. This project makes use of an original dataset—letters to the editor submitted to 33 of the nation’s largest newspapers during the early months of the pandemic—to analyze public attitudes about these restrictions. Like much of the previous work regarding attitudes towards rights and liberties during a crisis, we find that these concerns are not front of mind to the public. …

Categorically Caged: The Case For Extending Early Release Eligibility To Inmates With Violent Offense Convictions, Jenna M. Codignotto

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Susan Farrell faced both physical and sexual abuse from her husband before he was killed in 1989. Although Ms. Farrell maintained her innocence and urged that it was her son who killed her husband, she was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges, resulting in a life sentence without parole. After serving thirty years of her sentence at the Michigan Department of Corrections, Ms. Farrell’s tragic life met a no less tragic end. In April 2020, one month after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Ms. Farrell seized in her cell for forty-five minutes before dying from the virus. She …

Parens Patriae, Punishment, And Pandemics: The State’S Responsibility For Incarcerated Persons During A Public Health Emergency, Meredith Harrell

Journal of Law and Health

This article looks at the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since March 2020 and explores the commonalities and differences of states’ actions to protect their citizens, especially the most vulnerable populations. The article discusses the government’s obligations to jailees and prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic and how incarcerated persons have been consistently failed by the institutions that are required to protect them. The article examines possible remedies for these governmental and institutional failings under the Eighth Amendment and § 1983 civil rights claims. Ultimately the article proposes that monetary damages would provide relief to incarcerated individuals and their families …

Crisis As A Catalyst For Rebirth: Disrupting Entrenched Educational Inequality In The Covid Era, Erin M. Carr

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

The public health and socio-economic crisis that has resulted from the pandemic has amplified existing social inequalities. The disparate racial impact of COVID-19 is a consequence of enduring social, economic, and political injustices that manifest in the form of health status and access, wealth, employment, and housing, all of which have contributed to a greater susceptibility to the virus by racially minoritized communities. racial inequities, educational inequities,

The compounding of racial inequities in all aspects of American life has logically extended to the educational sphere, where pre-pandemic educational inequities have been greatly exacerbated. In marking the passage of the 65th …

Pandemic Policing, Christian Sundquist

Georgia State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Weathering The Pandemic: Dying Old At A Young Age From Pre-Existing Racist Conditions, Arline T. Geronimus

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Mainstream social epidemiology now acknowledges the contributions of interpersonal racism, racialized stress, and implicit bias to population health inequity. It also increasingly recognizes that current and historical racist policies place barriers in the way of healthy lifestyles by institutionalizing food deserts, housing decay, and austerity urbanism. Essential as these developments are, they only skim the surface of how insidiously structural racism establishes and reproduces population health inequity. I coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of sustained cultural oppression upon the body. Weathering expands on the more conventional “social determinants of health” approach to understand the contextually fluctuating and …

Empathy’S Promise And Limits For Those Disproportionately Harmed By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Theresa Glennon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Structural race, ethnicity, and class disparities in the United States concentrated and intensified the health, economic, and psychological impact of COVID-19 for certain populations. Those same structural disparities and the belief system that maintains them may also account for the weak policy response that left the United States with high rates of infection and death, economic devastation of individuals, families, and small businesses, and psychological distress. A more equal society with a stronger pre-pandemic safety net may have prevented or eased the disproportionate hardship and avoided the drama and cliffhanging. Or the shock of a pandemic and likelihood of extreme …

Persistent Inequalities, The Pandemic, And The Opportunity To Compete, Rachel F. Moran

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Even before the recent coronavirus pandemic, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status played a powerful role in allocating opportunity—in the public schools and elsewhere. The pandemic has laid bare the dimensions of this inequality with a new and alarming clarity. In this essay, I first will focus on the landscape of educational inequity that existed before the coronavirus forced public schools to shut down. In particular, I will explore patterns of racial and ethnic segregation in America’s schools and how those patterns are linked to additional challenges based on socioeconomic isolation. In addition, I will consider the role of language and …

Rationing In The Time Of Covid And The Perils Of Anti-Subordination Rhetoric, Mark Kelman

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

With surges in COVID-19 cases threatening to overload some hospital facilities, we must face the possibility that therapeutic treatments will need to be rationed, at least in some places. I do not propose any particular ideal rationing scheme but caution strongly against adopting a position that Professor Bagenstos advocated this past spring, rejecting rationing on the basis of patient life expectancy simply because life expectancy based rationing might threaten the factual interests of those with disabilities and might conceivably be implemented by those making judgments that were not simply inaccurate but grounded in biased, unacceptably discriminatory intuitions that some decision …

Covid-19 And The Conundrum Of Mask Requirements, Robert Gatter, Seema Mohapatra

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

As states begin to loosen their COVID-19 restrictions, public debate is underway about what public health measures are appropriate. Many states have some form of mask-wearing orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection. Public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization has conflicted. From a public health point of view, it is not clear what the right answer is. In the absence of directives, individuals are also making their own choices about mask use. At a time when public health measures, like shelter-in-place orders and social distancing, are being used to …