Slepian Co-Authors 'Constitutional Norms for Pandemic Policy'

Marvin Slepian, associate department head and clinical professor of BME, has co-authored an essay published in the Social Science Research Network on how the U.S. Constitution may guide law and public policy during a pandemic. 

The essay, "Constitutional Norms for Pandemic Policy," was co-written with Toni M. Massaro and Justin R. Pidot of the James E. Rogers College of Law. 

According to the essay:

"Public perceptions about [COVID-19], and our responses to it, have substantially fallen along predictable ideological lines. For example, the willingness of individuals to social distance may indicate something about their risk tolerance, but also about their political affiliation. Our ability to launch a unified response to COVID-19 has, in other words, been affected by rifts that generally infect American political life.

How we manage these divides over pandemic response matters, because the costs of disunity are high. Those who fear the risk COVID-19 poses to their lives depend on others to participate in mitigation efforts; those who fear the risk our response to COVID-19 poses to their livelihoods depend on others to willingly reengage in economic life. Common ground, while elusive, is essential to America’s response to this pandemic, and the next one that will surely follow.

We argue that ingredients for consensus already exist, even if they are obscured by political and policy rancor. Americans share the common goal to safely return to families, jobs, schools, places of assembly, pubs, parks, and the myriad of other settings that make up human lives and we share a fidelity to basic constitutional legal norms that can inform how we safely return."