Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments around the world scrambled to improvise solutions, implementing extensive, and often unprecedented, measures restricting the daily lives of their citizens and functioning of society. Under the shadow of the first wave of the pandemic, CAPI Director Victor V. Ramraj, an expert in the constitutional dimensions of emergency powers in Asia, galvanized an international network of sixty-one legal scholars and social scientists to examine Covid-19 policies and practices across the region.
The resulting product is an ambitious, open-access volume, Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts, published by Oxford University Press in December 2020, less than a year after the first reported case in Canada. The collection comprises twenty-nine chapters covering jurisdictional-specific analyses and cross-cutting themes organized under five sections: (1) first wave containment measures; (2) emergency powers; (3) technology, science, and expertise; (4) politics, religion, and governance; and (5) economy, climate, and sustainability.
This book is a welcome archive, documenting governmental reactions across Asia to the early spread of a pandemic unparalleled in our lifetime.
- Book review by Jane P. Bahnson, Head of Research and Instruction, Goodson Law Library, Duke Law School