The fact that healthcare workers are writing their wills reminds us that there is a legal life to this pandemic age. In Southasia, COVID-19 will confound the legal preparations of households and institutions while enabling sweeping new state powers. As elsewhere, it will also birth new kinds of fraud and crime.
Much of this may feel unprecedented. But epidemic diseases have been distorting Southasian law for centuries. If the legal history of pandemics were a classic film, its stars would be the grim duo of cholera and the bubonic plague. Influenza would play a supporting role.
Such a film would begin with struggling courts and lawyers. When the bubonic plague arrived in Bombay in 1896, it immobilised the courts and the legal profession. A managing clerk named A J C Mistry at the Bombay law firm Wadia Ghandy & Co. described the situation in early 1897. Most people had fled Bombay, which had "the melancholy appearance of a deserted city." Trade was paralysed, the value of immovable property dropped, and the judges of the Bombay High Court "had no work to do." Although Wadia Ghandy's support staff returned to work in just four months, at least three would die over the next decade due to the plague. This included a Parsi copyist called Dinshaw Dorabji Bhajiwalla, who died in 1907 along with several members of his family. The deaths, Mistry writes, "caused a stir in Bombay".
When the flu arrived in 1918, the Calcutta High Court was similarly hit. Assistants in several departments fell sick, as did lawyers and jurors. The Court continued to sit, but with more delays than usual. A century later, the court's regular work is now suspended due to COVID-19, but with videoconferencing for urgent matters.