Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
In the history of the law of epidemics, there have been two traditions in European and North American legal systems. The first, and in some respects the oldest, has been quarantine. The second has been sanitation. Quarantinist policies first took their modern form in eastern Europe when cholera made its way from east to west in the eighteenth century. Autocratic states like Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia responded to the cholera threat by implementing controls that limited freedom of movement in the service of public health. By enacting these restrictive controls, as historian Peter Baldwin has analyzed, these states recalibrated the balance between individual autonomy and state preventive measures and, in so doing, further developed modern iterations of absolutist government and politics. Prussia, for example, authorized its soldiers to shoot violators of the militarized cordon sanitaires along their borders. Throughout the region, travelers faced quarantines, enforced reporting requirements, isolation obligations, and stiff criminal penalties, including imprisonment …

Sierra Stubbs and John F Witt, Tort Law’s New Quarantinism: Race and Coercion in the Age of a Novel Coronavirus, 71 DePaul Law Review 613 (2022).