Legal governance of disaster brings both care and punishment to the upending of daily life of place-based disasters. National states use disasters to reorganize how they govern. This collection considers how law is implicated in disaster. The late modern expectation that states are to care for their population makes it particularly important to point out the limits to care - limits that appear less in the grand rhetoric than in the government reports, case-level decisionmaking, administrative rules, and criminalization that make up governing. The authors argue that government documents explaining disaster put the responsibility to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances on people - often on individuals - not on the government. Law is a causal force in what are commonly called natural disasters. When courts consider causation and property rights, often separated across cases and over time, they often defer to the importance of economic activity. Police forces charged with protection rapidly turn on those they are to protect, thinking that people need protection from the victims of disaster. These insightful essays feature leading scholars whose perspectives range across disasters around the world. Their findings point to reconsidering what states do in disaster, and how law enables and constrains action.

As officials scrambled in 2020 to manage the spread of COVID, the reverberations of the crisis reached well beyond immediate public health concerns. The governance problems that emerged in the pandemic would be problems in other climate-related disasters, too. Many of these governance problems wound up in court. Businesses filed insurance claims for lost commerce; when the claims were denied, some companies sued. Defense attorneys tried to get inmates released from prison, citing dangerous living conditions. As state governments ordered closures and otherwise tried to adapt, interest organizations that had long sought to limit government authority challenged them in court. Political officials railed against litigation they argued would stop businesses from reopening. The United States, like other countries, governs partly through litigation, and litigation is one way of seeing the multiple governance failures during the pandemic. Drawing on databases of cases filed, news reports, and the websites of advocacy groups and law firms, Susan M. Sterett argues that governing during the pandemic, or in any disaster, must include the human institutions intertwined with the effects of the virus. Those institutions reveal problems well beyond the reach of technical expertise. Failures in private insurance as a way of governing risk, conflicts about the primacy of religion, government authority, and health, are problems that predated the pandemic and will persist in future disasters.

Legal governance of disaster brings both care and punishment to the upending of daily life of place-based disasters. National states use disasters to reorganize how they govern. This collection considers how law is implicated in disaster. The late modern expectation that states are to care for their population makes it particularly important to point out the limits to care-limits that appear less in the grand rhetoric than in the government reports, case-level decisionmaking, administrative rules, and criminalization that make up governing. These insightful essays feature leading scholars whose perspectives range across disasters around the world. Their findings point to reconsidering what states do in disaster, and how law enables and constrains action. The chapters are:

Introduction (Susan Sterett) 1 Uncertain Governance and Resilient Subjects in the Risk Society (Pat O'Malley) 2 Land Use Planning and Disaster: A European Perspective from Spain (Juli Ponce) 3 Law, State and the Politics of Catastrophes: A Critical Perspective on Epiphanies of Injustice and the Need for Protection (Valerio Nitrato Izzo) 4 The Comparative Jurisprudence of Wildfire Mitigation: Moral Community, Political Culture, and Policy Learning (Lloyd Burton) 5 Transboundary Impacts of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake Disaster: Focus on Legal Dilemmas in South Florida (Alka Sapat & Ann-Margaret Esnard) 6 Disaster Mythology and Availability Cascades (Lisa Grow Sun) 7 The Role of Law in Engineering "Natural" Disasters (Arthur F. McEvoy) 8 Multi-level Governance in Environmental Risk Management (Petra Hiller) 9 Internal Environmental Displacement: A Growing Challenge to the U.S. Welfare State (Michelle A. Meyer) 10 Long Term Recovery in Disaster Response and the Role of Non-Profits (Victor B. Flatt & Jeffrey J. Stys) 11 Disasters, Focusing Events, and Sociolegal Studies (Thomas A. Birkland)

The authors analyze sociological and legal issues surrounding disasters and catastrophic events in their many forms: natural, man-made, environmental, human, local, and global. The project was developed as part of the the Onati Socio-legal Series supported by the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and is now presented by Quid Pro Books in the "Contemporary Society Series."

Whilst immigration policy is a highly controversial topic in the West, states continue to receive people who settle, whether as asylum-seekers or refugees, or as family members of existing migrants or labour migrants. Many who move violate the immigration rules either in entering a country or staying beyond the time allowed. The problems illegality entails for migrants shape much of the law and society scholarship in this area and this volume brings together the key articles which shape current thinking. The main topics covered include illegality, mercy and the language of deservingness; transnationality; family and identity; refugees and asylum-seekers.