Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 (LAC19): A global academic project tracking and analysing worldwide legal responses to Covid-19
The Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 (LAC19) is a comparative research project offering scholarly curated information and analysis of legal responses to Covid-19 globally. It is an unprecedented collaboration of nearly 200 jurists worldwide spread over 60 countries representing all regions of the world. The participating countries were selected with the aim of achieving sufficient representativeness according to criteria including level of socio-economic development, type of political regime, type of legal system and performance in the response to the pandemic.
The primary output of the LAC19 is the Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19 (The Compendium), which was launched on 21 April 2021 and is open to access free of charge. The Compendium is composed of 60 national reports written by local legal experts on their countries’ response to Covid-19. These reports provide an in-depth account of how countries have employed emergency powers to address the pandemic within their particular constitutional structure and legal framework and covers institutional oversight and key measures adopted in the areas of public health social and economic policy and the protection of vulnerable groups and human rights. As a result of this effort, the Compendium will provide critical data for cross-national comparative analysis of responses to Covid-19 on an integrated platform. The Compendium will make available a wealth of information invaluable for the historical record and evaluative judgements of state responses to Covid-19, as well as equip policymakers for future pandemic preparedness.
As well as the Compendium, the LAC19 team will produce datasets systematizing the information collected via the Compendium, and a series of analytical outputs, including blog posts, short papers (‘LAC19 Insights’) on relevant comparative legal topics. The Editorial Committee will also prepare a Preliminary and a Final Report in late 2022 bringing together all the findings of the project which will be discussed in two workshops in late 2021 and mid 2022.
The project is a cooperation between the TLI, the Faculty of Laws, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, who have provided seed funding, as well as a major grant by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). For further information and access to the project portal, please visit the Lex-atlas website.