IU McKinney Law Class Puts Pandemic under Legal Microscope
04/08/2022
The global COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to legal and policy issues that will likely be discussed in law school courses for decades to come, but students at IU McKinney are already taking an in-depth look.
IU McKinney Law Professor Nicolas Terry created a course, “The Law of COVID,” for the 2022 spring semester. The course explores a range of issues related to the ongoing health crisis: government powers and responsibility during a pandemic; health disparities; legal protections for workers, families, and the most vulnerable; and information, disinformation, and data management.
For McKinney law student Chitra Ram, the idea of exploring the pandemic—even as it continues to unfold—was irresistible. “It is a topic that has been at the center of our lives, and especially my law school experience, so I was excited to be a part of it,” she said.
Students in the course are asked to formulate arguments for alternatives to—or removal of—pandemic management policies. They write and present policy briefs, and draft targeted recommendations.
During one recent class, McKinney Law students presented their research and policy recommendations on issues such as mask mandates in elementary schools, the housing crisis and COVID-19, and the pandemic’s impact on hospitals’ surgical triage practices.
Deirdre Madden, professor of law at Ireland’s University College Cork, sat in on the class on April 5, during a visit to the law school that included her IU McKinney Grand Rounds lecture, “Law as a Tool to Improve the Quality of Healthcare.”
An expert in law and ethics, Professor Madden serves as deputy chair of the Board of the Health Service Executive, which runs the health service in Ireland. She quizzed students about their projects and offered comparisons to Irish responses to the pandemic.
“I don’t know of anyone else offering this kind of course,” she said.
COVID -19 raised challenging legal and policy questions about federalism, including the appropriate balance between federal and state rights, and separation of powers, including duties in response and between legislators and administrations at both state and federal levels, and how such powers should be used, Professor Terry said.
“The public health emergency quickly morphed into a healthcare emergency emphasizing long-standing issues such as access to health care, substance use treatment, mental health parity, and the regulation of long-term care facilities,” he said.
Professor Terry is the Hall Render Professor of Law and executive director of the Hall Center for Law and Health at IU McKinney, where he teaches healthcare and health policy courses. Teaching the course seemed like a natural follow-up from the work that he and other health law professors have been engaged in at the outset of the pandemic in 2020, and that continues today, he said.
He was one of 50 top national experts to contribute to a playbook offering an assessment of the U.S. policy response to the COVID-19 crisis, detailing the widespread failure of the country’s leadership in planning and executing a cohesive national response, and how the crisis exposed weaknesses in the nation’s health care and public health systems.
A frequent speaker and media expert on the U.S. response and public health consequences, Professor Terry is one of the permanent bloggers at the Bill of Health blog, a host of “The Week in Health Law” podcast at TWIHL.com, where the pandemic is frequently the subject of discussion.
Professor Terry’s scholarship during the pandemic—when COVID-19 news, policies and legal questions seem, at times, to mutate nearly as fast as the virus itself—brings credibility to classroom discussions.
“Professor Terry does an excellent job of bringing to class the most up-to-date information on where we are in this COVID-19 journey – providing the most recent statistics, news, and legal information,” said McKinney Law student Amy Martin.
The statistics and data on COVID-related deaths, long-term health consequences, immunizations, healthcare, and collateral impact have been sobering, Ram said.
“It has also been a learning experience to find how many practices we could easily implement to improve the accuracy and accessibility of data, and in real time, to interpret the data and consider solutions to visible—and unmeasured—issues that can be carried forward sustainably,” she said.
