For over a hundred years, the U.S. Supreme Court—and an array of state supreme courts—consistently rejected arguments that businesses open to the public have a constitutional right to provide less than the full and equal services required by antidiscrimination laws. The Supreme Court made clear that public accommodations law “does not, on its face, target speech or discriminate on the basis of its content.”
As COVID-19 continues to disrupt the workplace, legal analysts struggle to predict how infected laborers’ claims will fare in workers’ compensation systems. Workers’ compensation systems vary across states, but their purpose is the same—to give employees who are injured through the everyday completion of their jobs access to sure-fire compensation.
As we know all too well, the COVID-19 pandemic caught the world off-guard. The virus continues to accumulate a staggering list of victims, but the direct threat to public health also carried with it shock waves that rocked the global economy.
In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down economies around the world, pressure arose for governments to respond to the growing threat of pandemic-related market distress. In addition to responding to the direct public health emergency, governments were expected to stabilize markets—both financial and economic—and provide relief to those harmed by the pandemic’s market effects.
The economic dislocation associated with the COVID-19 pandemic might have been reduced if pandemic insurance were widespread. Yet, outside of the All England Club, host of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament, virtually no one held pandemic insurance.
Observers have long debated the propriety of certain market exchanges involving the body, including prostitution, organ and gamete selling, commercial surrogacy, and blood and plasma markets, so called “contested commodities” or “taboo trades.” Although such disputes about the nature of market boundaries are long-standing, particularly in the context of the human body, recent years have seen a renewed focus on the ways in which attitudes about the proper scope of commercial exchange shape markets—and, indeed, dictate whether exchange for money occurs at all.
