Constitutional law has helped make Americans unhealthy, argues public health law expert Professor Wendy E. Parmet in her new book, Constitutional Contagion: COVID, the Courts, and Public Health (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Drawing from law, history, political theory and public health research, Constitutional Contagion explores the history of public health laws, the nature of liberty and individual rights, and the forces that make a nation more or less vulnerable to contagion.

In this groundbreaking book, Parmet documents how the Supreme Court departed from past practice to stymie efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrates how pre-pandemic court decisions helped to shatter social contracts, weaken democracy and perpetuate the inequities that made the United States especially vulnerable when COVID-19 struck. Looking at judicial decisions from an earlier era, Parmet argues that the Constitution does not compel the stark individualism and disregard of public health that is evident in contemporary constitutional law decisions.

Parmet shows us why, if we are to be a healthy nation, constitutional law must change. “I began this book to discuss the dramatic changes that were occurring in public health law during the pandemic. But my research led me to recognize that the threats that constitutional law posed to Americans’ health long preceded the pandemic. And they ranged far beyond decisions pertaining to public health regulations. Doctrines relating to freedom of speech, race discrimination and voting rights, to name just a few, are all serving to undermine Americans’ health and magnify health inequities. This book shows how they do so and why the conceptions of liberty they purport to defend are needlessly thin and ahistorical,” said Parmet, recipient of the American Public Health Association Law Section’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement in Public Health Law Award. Parmet’s previous books include The Health of Newcomers: Immigration, Health Policy, and the Case for Global Solidarity (co-author; NYU Press, 2017), Ethical Health Care (co-author; Prentice Hall, 2005) and Populations, Public Health, and the Law (Georgetown University Press, 2009). She also served as co-editor of Debates on U.S. Health Care (Sage Press, 2012).

In March, the third edition of Professor Martha Davis’ co-edited book, Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West Academic Publishing, 3rd edition, 2023), came out to cheers from human rights law teachers and scholars nationwide. The only law school casebook focused on human rights advocacy in the United States, the book illuminates a range of both emerging challenges and persistent theoretical and doctrinal issues while equipping students to thoughtfully engage human rights law and strategies in their own practice of law.

Davis also recently celebrated the paperback debut of her co-edited Research Handbook on Human Rights and Poverty (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021; paperback, 2023), which explores the nexus between human rights, poverty and inequality as a critical lens for understanding and addressing key challenges of the coming decades, including the many objectives set out in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The Research Handbook starts from the premise that poverty is not solely an issue of minimum income and explores the profound ways that deprivation and distributive inequality of power and capability relate to economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights.

“I’m excited that these two books will continue to be available to interested readers, hopefully informing efforts to implement human rights on the ground,” said Davis, the author or editor of several books, including, most recently, COVID-19 and Human Rights (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021).

Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams has been the best-selling book on law exams since its original publication in 1999. Now, Professor Jeremy Paul and co-author Professor Richard Michael Fischl of the University of Connecticut School of Law have released the second edition of their guide to how law exams test legal reasoning and why legal reasoning cannot be reduced to any simple “check the boxes” template.

“We could not be more proud of our updated volume,” said Paul, who served as dean of Northeastern Law from 2012 to 2018. “But the basic point remains the same: being a law student and ultimately a lawyer has little to do with straightforward application of rules and everything to do with exercising judgment in ambiguous situations in which the intuition ‘I’m not sure’ is not a mark of failure but the beginning of wisdom.”

Law students give the book high marks because it avoids abstruse lectures and instead offers a clear, readable and often humorous approach to how lawyers and judges deploy legal reasoning in real-world disputes and how law professors test such disputes on law exams. Responding to reader feedback, the authors offer a much-anticipated second edition with new material focusing on exam preparation, drafting successful exam answers that avoid common mistakes and tackling complicated multiple-choice questions.