Interventions in public health crises inevitably give rise to concerns about how the balance between rights concerns and community health security might be handled. During the SARS global health crisis, different jurisdictions struggled simultaneously with similar public health challenges posed by the previously unknown and deadly disease. Yet instead of a convergence of strategies, different jurisdictions responded with measures, especially with regard to the use of quarantine, that revealed a pattern of divergence about how to strike the balance between rights concerns and health security. The origins of this article stem from the realization that Toronto's use of quarantine was far more extensive than that of either Hong Kong or Shanghai, two jurisdictions with historically weak records regarding respect for fundamental rights and civil liberties. Perspectives on the balancing of individual rights and community health security are treated here as expressions of legal consciousness. Instead of assuming a uniform legal consciousness in Toronto, Shanghai, or Hong Kong, this article presents legal consciousness as varied among groups of individuals differently situated in the crisis. The promise of this differentiated approach to legal consciousness is that it facilitates both drawing contrasts between perspectives of differently situated groups within the same city and noting commonalities between similarly situated groups in other cities. Through an examination of three distinct perspectives on rights and quarantine in each cityFthose of senior public health officials, frontline hospital workers, and contacts of SARS patientsFthe competing legal meanings and understandings about the tensions between community health security and individual rights during the SARS crisis are identified in a way that enables us to better understand the pattern of different uses of quarantine.
Two approaches to making judgments about moral urgency in educational policy have prevailed in American law and public policy. One approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing equal opportunities in education for all. The other approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing adequate opportunities in education for all. Although the former has deep roots in American culture and its jurisprudence, a common narrative is that in recent years the equal opportunities approach has been displaced by the educational adequacy approach, which is said both to have enjoyed much greater success in the school financing litigation as well as to be theoretically more defensible. The present article is designed to make a contribution to the retrieval of the equal opportunities approach. It does so by sketching out a theory of equal opportunities in education organized around the idea of stakes fairness that can withstand the criticisms often made of that approach and by showing how that theory is better able than the educational adequacy approach to address the fairness of a more robust educational policy agenda that extends beyond school financing.
This article advances an alternative paradigm for making judgments about China's compliance with its international obligations in the realm of health and human rights, grounded on the reality that non-local rule regimes are interpreted and applied according to the extent of commonality between the norms underlying these international rule regimes and local cultural norms. This paradigm, "selective adaptation", allows us to determine that China complied with its international obligations in the case of SARS, but not HIV/AIDS. It makes visible how during SARS China eventually complied with the spirit of the international sanitation regulations but the lack of commitment to improving access to health care for persons living with HIV/AIDS reflects a failure by China to guarantee the right to adequate health care.
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