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American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19
Maybe someday
35
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
9/100Critics
7/100Scholars
88/100Author:
John Fabian Witt
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Date:
October 27, 2020
A concise history of how American law has shapedâand been shaped byâthe experience of contagious disease over the centuries.
What The Reviewers Say
There’s something to be said for a book that takes the bewildering cacophony of American approaches to the pandemic and tries to bring some clarity to how we got here.
Mr. Witt ranges widely, roping together into the Quarantinist State such disparate examples as sensible colonial-era quarantines for overseas arrivals, abominable anti-Chinese laws of the early 20th century, and 'America’s prison archipelago' today. Pandemics begin to seem little more than a loose organizing principle for Mr. Witt’s laundry lists of policy complaints.
In a book that’s both timely, considering the pandemic, and remarkably speedy, considering that it began as a spring 2020 Yale Law School class, Bancroft Prize winner Witt looks at the sometimes contending, sometimes cooperating forces of public interest and private liberty in times of epidemic disease.
