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Jothie Rajah explains the land grab in the Mubende District of Uganda through a global sociolegal approach.

This report, published by the ABF in 2022, is a five-year update into the career progress and education of Asian American attorneys.

This policy brief details the key findings from ABF’s Portrait Project 2.0: Identity and Action in Challenging Times.

Ajay K. Mehrotra analyzes the history of U.S. tax policy and the role of experts in shaping tax laws, with a focus on the value-added tax (VAT).

Featuring Laura Beth Nielsen, this article details the experiences of survivors of inter-fraternal sexual violence and the culture that inhibits justice-seeking.

This volume offers the first comprehensive account of the intricate ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted, and co-evolved.

This article by Christopher Schmidt analyzes the engagement with the history of the 14th Amendment during the litigation of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

This article, with Ajay K. Mehrotra, discusses the use of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement in sociolegal research to examine diversity in judicial clerkships.

This article, featuring ABF’s William H.J. Hubbard, considers how procedural design can serve the multiple goals of civil procedure.

This report, featuring Carol Heimer, explores the legal response to epidemics and how law can be used to fight the spread of infectious diseases.

  • Articles

Good Law to Fight Bad Bugs: Legal Responses to Epidemics

Carol A. Heimer and Clay Davis
Making and Implementing Law
October 2022

From Annual Review of Law and Social Science:

Although epidemics are generally understood as lying within the domain of biomedicine, legal and social arrangements play crucial roles in determining whether or not infectious disease outbreaks grow into epidemics and even pandemics. Yet epidemics are challenging terrain for legal regulation. Because epidemics cross political borders and span jurisdictional boundaries, funding for epidemic prevention, preparedness, and response is always inadequate and coordination is difficult. Because epidemics require rapid and nimble responses, governments and international organizations often declare states of emergency, thereby evading some of the usual strictures of law. And because they involve massive uncertainty and rapidly evolving health crises, they require legal actors to work more quickly and with lower standards of proof than is common in law and to intrude on the turf of medical and scientific professionals. Legal contributions to pandemic management could be improved if legal measures such as global treaties and domestic public health law took account of these special features of epidemics.