Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Legal History of Epidemics

Two online scholarly engagements with the legal history of epidemics have come to our attention.  The first, over at Environment, Law and History, is Legal History of Epidemics: Selected Sources, compiled by David Schorr, the Director of the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at the Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law.  (He would be pleased to receive additional suggestions.)  The second is Salus Populi, a five-segment Panopto lecture on the legal history of epidemics John Fabian Witt delivered to his American Legal History students at the Yale Law School last week.

Update: Via the American Historical Association's "Fortnightly News," we’ve learned that “the Stanton Foundation is launching a weekly contest to identify the best new applied history article or op-ed that analyzes history to clarify the medical, political, economic and/or international impact of COVID-19 and identifies lessons or clues for policymakers. Each week's winner will receive $1,000, with an additional $2,500 prize for the best overall.”  More.

--Dan Ernst