Litigating the Pandemic

"As officials scrambled in 2020 to manage the spread of COVID, the reverberations of the crisis reached well beyond immediate public health concerns. The governance problems that emerged in the pandemic would be problems in other climate-related disasters too. Many of these governance problems wound up in court. Businesses filed claims with their insurance for lost commerce; when they were denied, some sued. Defense attorneys tried to get people released from prison, where people lived in dangerous conditions. As state governments ordered closures and otherwise tried to adapt, interest organizations that had long sought to limit government authority challenged them in court. Political officials railed against litigation they argued would stop businesses from reopening. The United States, like other countries, governs partly through litigation, and litigation is one way of seeing the multiple governance failures during the pandemic. Drawing on databases of cases filed, news reports, and the websites of advocacy groups and law firms, Susan Sterett argues that governing during the pandemic, or in any disaster, must include the human institutions intertwined with the virus. Those institutions reveal problems well beyond the reach of technical expertise. Failures in private insurance as a way of governing risk, conflicts about the primacy of religion, government authority, and health, are problems that predated the pandemic and will persist in future disasters"--