New publication: Epidemics and the Law from Plague to the Present

Hart will publish Epidemics and the Law from Plague to the Present on 18 September 2025, edited by Ian Williams from the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, together with Charles Mitchell (UCL) and Emily Gordon (University of Cambridge).

This collection of essays presents a socio-legal history of epidemics from the medieval period to the present day. Building on previous studies of infectious diseases undertaken by social historians of medicine, this collection explores the histories of epidemics and disease by looking at the legal measures deployed against them.

The book explores how law has been involved in responses to infectious diseases from the fourteenth century onwards. The chapters are wide-ranging, considering topics as diverse as labour regulation, public law, property, tax and immigration, all of which have played their part in attempts to control the spread of disease and respond to the consequences of epidemics. It shows how the law has been used and abused to achieve health objectives or for other purposes in the guise of promoting health.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it features contributions from scholars across a range of academic disciplines who consider the wider implications of epidemics and disease beyond the obvious health effects. The collection focuses first on regulatory responses such as the quarantine laws and border policies in the eighteenth century, the framing of 'disease' in the Colonial Immigration Acts in the nineteenth century and the ethics of public health in the twentieth century in Great Britain. It then goes on to consider developments in broader legal doctrine which themselves resulted from social and/or legal responses to disease, including the centralisation of labour regulation in the wake of the black death, property disputes about leper houses, pest houses and fever hospitals, and the prosecution of medical professionals for disease transmission in 19th century England.

The book will be available to purchase from Hart Publishing.