Comparing Covid Laws: A Critical Global Survey

The Covid-19 pandemic brought about both the most serious public health crisis as well as, for many states, the most profound public interventions in individual liberties in the last century. Comparing Covid Laws: A Critical Global Survey examines the evidence of how fifty-three countries from around the world fared at providing an efficacious response within a framework respecting the rule of law, rights, and democratic government.The book draws primarily on data gathered within the Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 (LAC19) project, a worldwide collaboration of jurists that produced the fifty-three detailed and structurally identical country reports published in The Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19. This volume contains the considered critical judgments of the editorial committee of the Compendium. Over the course of twelve chapters, the text examines a wide range of topics including; the use of emergency powers to address the health crisis, the role of courts, the impact on women's rights, on privacy, on workers and on the right to protest. It also discusses how pandemic responses unfolded in particular ways in cities, federal countries and authoritarian settings.Editors Jeff King and Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz, as well as the contributors, were motivated by the belief, defended in the introduction of the book, that a good pandemic response is not simply one that achieves better outcomes in terms of morbidity and mortality, a topic that dominated discussions throughout the health crisis. A good pandemic response, they argue, is also one that pursues these goals in a manner that respects democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.

Table of Contents:
1: Introduction: Assessing Global Legal Responses to Covid-19 2: Jeff King: The Legislative Measures Model of Public Health Emergency Powers in Global Perspective 3: Nico Steytler: The Legal Response to Covid-19 in Federal Systems 4: Elena De Nictolis: Cities in the Legal Response to Covid-19 5: Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz: Pandemic Litigation and the Rule of Law: A Global Comparative Survey of the Role of Courts During the Health Crisis 6: Colleen M Flood and Bryan Thomas: Comparing Covid-19 Responses: Public Health and Human Rights 7: Pedro A Villarreal: Covid-19 and the Interplay Between National Law and International Health Norms 8: Alan BoggandNicola Countouris: Covid-19 and the Labour Market: Crisis and the Rediscovery of Social Law 9: Silvia Suteu: Pandemic Continuities through a Gendered Lens 10: Michael Veale: Privacy, Informational Infrastructures, and Covid-19: Comparative Legal Responses 11: Rebecca Freund: Opportunistic Use of Covid-19 Protest Restrictions: A Comparative Perspective 12: Eva Pils: (Il)legal Responses to Covid-19 in Autocratization Settings

About the Author :
Jeff King practiced law in New York before becoming a research fellow at Keble College (2007), and later tutorial fellow at Balliol College (2008-2011), University of Oxford. He moved to UCL Laws in 2011 and was made a Professor of Law in 2016. His 2012 monograph Judging Social Rights won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and in 2017 he won a Philip Leverhulme Prize in law. He was between 2019-2021 a legal adviser to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. He is the Deputy Director of the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism. Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz practiced law in Brazil before in 2006 becoming a senior research officer to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, based at the Human Rights Centre at Essex University. He moved to a lectureship at the University of Warwick that same year, before becoming a reader in law at King's College in 2014, and full professor in 2021. Between 2020 to 2025, he directed the Transnational Law Institute at King's College London. Ferraz has published extensively in the human rights field, including Health as a Human Right. The Politics and Judicialisation of Health in Brazil.