A comment on the law - and comments on the law - during the times of Covid (thread)
Necessity has demanded the most extraordinary measures to be implemented in many countries. They are restrictive in ways that would have made them comical law school hypos: “Imagine, a minister bans all religious services by way of statutory instrument” or ...
... “imagine that the government forbids you to see a friend in your house, but not in public”. A year ago, law school students would have commented with “my professor does horrible hypos“. Now they are our reality.
Because of the need to react quickly, many of these measures are passed by the executive, with little parliamentary input. They are, often, of rather poor quality - that is not meant as criticism, but flows naturally from the lack of time.
All of this implies a certain amount of uncertainty and contradiction. (Oh what a horribly worded sentence. I’ll just leave it like that). In some countries this has lead to a flood of court cases attacking coronavirus measures. That’s as it should be (rule of law!).
But now comes another factor: few people read the operative legal measures. So there’s a need for comment. Which the government does.
And this, in the UK, seems to have gone rather poorly. Measures have been announced before they actually exist. It has, at times, not been made sufficiently clear, whether an announcement was a binding measure, or just advice.
In an emergency situation, at times, this might be the only thing the government can do: there was no time, we announce, the measure comes later, it was the pragmatic thing to do. But do it too often and it causes confusion. Which, I fear, is where we are starting to be.
