Government,
Civil Rights
Apr. 14, 2020
115-year-old case does heavy lifting on coronavirus constitutional questions, says Berkeley law dean
A remnant from a time when smallpox still ravaged the country, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) has been successfully used to uphold a variety of methods used to fight pandemics, including quarantines, said UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
Novel legal questions, especially regarding limits on government entities shuttering businesses and canceling events, actually have answers in numerous precedents, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a wide-ranging Zoom presentation Monday.
Some of that case law has rarely come up in recent decades, Chemerinsky acknowledged, adding there is “broad government power to stop communicable disease.” Under these powers, he sai...
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