Policy Tracking in a Pandemic: Lessons Learned

The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to an extraordinarily high volume of legal activity in the United States. In addition to federal travel bans and economic stimulus legislation, states and localities enacted a variety of mitigation measures to combat the spread of COVID-19, including stay-at-home orders, business and school closures, and face mask requirements. Monitoring the state of the law in real time provides information about how government is responding to the pandemic and what rules currently apply. While the prompt documentation of policy change through conventional legal research is critical to the situational awareness of policy makers and the public, not all policy tracking creates the rigorous and reliable legal data required for research. Empirical legal data enables evaluations of the direct effects and side effects of legal measures on health and health equity. Now more than ever, law must be a primary target for health research. This Chapter describes the methods used to create credible data for evaluation research, discusses policy tracking efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, and closes with reflections and recommendations for supporting scientific legal tracking in the future. This paper was prepared as part of the COVID-19 Policy Playbook: Legal Recommendations for a Safer, More Equitable Future, a comprehensive report published by Public Health Law Watch in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association.