An Influential Yet Little-Known Document May Determine Your Civil Liberties

A commission of law officials from all fifty states is in the process of creating a legal framework to give wide powers to governors and state authorities during emergencies

David Zweig Jun 8, 2023

When I spoke to a couple attorney friends recently and asked them about the Uniform Law Commission one responded, “That’s really in the weeds legal stuff! Why are you interested in the ULC?” The other laughed and said, “I haven’t thought about this since law school.”

But the ULC—an organization that is highly influential yet scarcely known to the general public—drew my attention because it has taken on an issue of great and direct consequence to anyone invested in civil liberties: state emergency powers.

The ULC’s mission seems fairly prosaic: differences in state laws lead to a lot of headaches for interstate business dealings and other legal matters—the ULC exists to remedy this by making state laws more uniform. The organization comprises commissioners from each state who work together to draft statutes (essentially model laws), with the aim that individual state legislatures will then vote to adopt these statutes—the more states that adopt them the better. The Commission has influenced the passing of hundreds of laws, with its most famous accomplishment the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs commercial transactions.

But aside from the typical interstate legal matters under the organization’s mandate, one of its current projects—which seeks to unify and clarify governors’ special powers—may ultimately have a far more profound impact.............The powers the Act seeks to endow governors with are not trivial. They include the ability to issue orders for :

• testing, isolation, quarantine, movement, gathering, evacuation, or relocation of individuals;
• the suspension of any statute, rule, and regulation if strict compliance would hinder efforts to respond to the public health emergency;
• zoning, operation, commandeering, use, or management of buildings, shelters, facilities, parks, outdoor space, or other physical space, and the management of activities in those places.

As if that wasn’t expansive enough, the Act also states a governor “may issue any order to eliminate, reduce, contain, or mitigate an effect of the public-health emergency.” [Emphasis mine.] It’s hard to imagine more open-ended powers than that..............To Read More....