American contagions : epidemics and the law from smallpox to COVID-19 Cover Image

Book

American contagions : epidemics and the law from smallpox to COVID-19 / John Fabian Witt.

Summary:

" From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history's answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?"--Amazon.

Record details

ISBN: 0300257279
ISBN: 9780300257274
Physical Description: 174 pages ; 22 cm
Publisher: New Haven, Connecticut : Yale University Press, [2020]
Copyright: ©2020

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Introduction -- The sanitationist state -- Quarantinism in America -- Civil liberties in an epidemic? -- New sanitionisms / new quarantinisms -- Masked faces toward the past -- Afterword: Viral protests.