As scholars Lawrence Gostin and Sarah Wetter recently noted in The Atlantic, executive actions ordering states to close or open their economies would be “legally murky” at best.
“Constitutional authority for ordering major public-health interventions, such as mass quarantines and physical distancing, lies primarily with US states and localities via their ‘police powers’—a drastic difference from the national authorities of countries such as China and Italy,” write Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown, and Wetter, a Law Fellow at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
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