Max Planck Law are please to announce that a project organized within the framework of the Max Planck Law Initatives by Dr Pedro Villarreal and Irene Dmenici entitled ‘The Fragmented Nature of Pandemic Decision-making: Comparative and Multilevel Legal Analysis’, has published its outcomes in a special issue of the European Journal of Health Law, see: Volume 29 (2022): Issue 1 (Mar 2022).
Nearly two years in the making, the project involved collaboration between researchers across a number of Max Planck Institutes. In December 2020, the project held an online workshop to exchange perspectives relating to the researchers on COVID-19 and to prepare a road map towards publication of the results as we see them today.
Villarreal and Domenici, also the editors of the special issue, introduce the publication in useful summary form:
The unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on the role that multiple legal and regulatory instruments play in a global emergency, whether at the international, regional or national level. Countries around the globe faced comparable challenges in responding to the pandemic crisis within the framework of their respective legal systems. While the need for international coordination has only increased, a variety of legal issues have also arisen distinctly depending on regional and national settings. It is against this background that the current special issue seeks to assume a simultaneously comparative and multilevel perspective to evaluate the different layers of pandemic decision-making.
In total the special issue consists of six articles in addition to the editorial introduction, almost all of which were authored by researchers across Max Planck Law. The editors recognize that the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overcome by ‘silo thinking’. By this they mean that an ‘integrative legal approach involving several perspectives is patently necessary’. In this, they acknowledge the networked structure of Max Planck Law as contributing to a breaking out of silo thinking, encouraging as it does inter- and intra-disciplinary collaboration across and beyond individual Max Planck Institutes.