The Health of Newcomers: Immigration, Health Policy and The Case for Global Solidarity with Patricia Illingworth (2017).
Parmet applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Constitutional Contagion: COVID, the Courts, and Public Health, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test works only partially for Constitutional Contagion. Page 99 appears in Chapter 5, "The Mandate Wars." Almost midway through the book, the chapter recounts the legal contests over mask and vaccine mandates that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, the reasons for those battles, and their impact on the course of the pandemic. To set the stage for this discussion, page 99 provides critical background information about the state of vaccine law before the pandemic, explaining why courts had long held that vaccine mandates were constitutional and did not have to include religious exemptions. As the chapter later shows, that consensus broke down during the pandemic as the Supreme Court altered its approach to religious liberty and separation of powers cases. The uncertainty created by the Court’s new approach, in turn, fueled contestation, litigation, and vaccine resistance. The chapter ends warning that “childhood vaccination rates may well fall, giving rise to outbreaks of measles, chicken pox, and pertussis, among old killers,” and that due to the Court’s new approach, the government may be less able to address new public health challenges, including those posed by climate change.Learn more about Constitutional Contagion at the Cambridge University Press website.
Although page 99 is critical to appreciating the dramatic and dangerous shifts in public health law that occurred during the pandemic, the page on its own does not develop the book’s larger themes. In particular, page 99 does not explain, as the book does, why the individualism of contemporary constitutional law leaves us vulnerable to pandemics and other forms of contagion. It also does not discuss the asymmetry of rights protected by American courts or show why that asymmetry privileges a thin conception of liberty that threatens health. Most importantly, page 99 does not show, as the chapters that follow do, how a multitude of pre-pandemic judicial decisions relating to race discrimination, immigration, access to health care, free speech, election law and many other issues helped to lay the foundation for America’s catastrophic response to COVID-19, shorten Americans’ lives, and magnify health inequities. In short, page 99 offers only one small step in a much broader argument about how constitutional law helped to make Americans unhealthy.
The Page 99 Test: The Health of Newcomers by Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet.
--Marshal Zeringue
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