Covid-19, law and legal order: metaphmorphoses of pandemic times

Abstract

Тhe article reviews the current and subsequent effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the quarantine regime imposed by the authorities of various countries on law and legal order. The updating of the legal aspects of the situation arose in this regard demonstrated the variety of legal instruments used in different countries, rather significant differences in their effectiveness, revealed latent features of the legal culture and fleeting changes in the field of legal order.

Moreover, the legal transformations already caused by the pandemic in a record-breaking short period, as well as probable changes in the legal sphere in the future, concern almost all aspects of the legal sphere and therefore require comprehensive, systemic reflection. The way in which the legal framework for dealing with the pandemic was set up in different countries is an extremely interesting scientific plot, the careful deployment and dissection of which will provide another opportunity to understand the diversity, heterogeneity and complex peripetias of the process of forming a "collective aggregor" of law and legal culture among different peoples and their inherent political elites. It is also important that in this completely new public space, created by the effect of the pandemic, medical, epidemiological, security, legal, as well as political and economic aspects have been combined into such a close and organically intertwined ball, through the prism of which only the nature of this unknown to the modern generation of people a kind of "synthetic" state of social and legal life (and legal order) can be understood. Certain transformations have taken place in the sphere of legal order, which has acquired the signs of epidemiological state of legal life, in which the dominant type of legally significant behaviour is the observance or violation of established quarantine rules. This behaviour has become a certain marker of quality of public organization of life of both individuals and their communities. Another characteristic feature of this "quarantine" (or "epidemiological") legal order is the transfer of a significant part of legal life into the non-public area, into the family, which during this period became the "main theatre ground" of life of the whole society. The author refers to a certain range of problems that require further research by lawyers.