Sean E. Bland (Santa Clara University School of Law) has posted Decriminalizing Disease: A Health Justice Approach to Infectious Diseases and Criminal Law (Arkansas Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
For more than a century, the United States has used criminal law to respond to infectious diseases. From the start, this response was not grounded in evidence. Not only is criminalization ineffective at preventing transmission, it often is counter-productive to public health interventions and is selectively enforced against marginalized groups. The story of the criminalization of HIV provides a powerful indictment of this response. This criminalization emerged in a climate of fear and moral panic and in the absence of effective treatment, and yet it continues today. Without a full reckoning with the harms caused by the criminalization of public health problems, we risk perpetuating them.