Law and the Pandemic: The Lessons of the Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic is exerting pressure on law and order, testing the strength of their basic elements and subsystems. It is transforming positive law and system-forming processes in the legal sphere, which ensure the functioning of the legal organization of society developed in the prepandemic period. The pandemic affects it indirectly, having a transformative effect on the mechanisms for exercising public power, law formation, and law implementation, including law enforcement. During the pandemic, human rights, which were not previously positioned in this capacity, have acquired absolute importance. Among them is the right to health protection and proper medical care. Along with this, special legal regimes and many legal institutions of both public and private law have been modernized, and new legal models and practices have been tested that are suitable not only for regulating social relations in extraordinary conditions but also for creating law and order in postpandemic society. Some of them have already been implemented into ordinary legislation. The doctrine recorded a growing multifunctionality of some legal means, as well as the emergence of new legal phenomena, in particular, antipandemic legislation. According to the authors of this article, to respond effectively to emergency situations, it is necessary to expand the existing variable scenarios of legal regulation and create appropriate regulatory templates, algorithms, and procedures for the activities of public authorities, as well as the scopes of their competence in the event of such situations. For Russian law and order, it is relevant in this context to systematize the legal basis of special legal regimes designed for crisis situations with account for the correction made, as well as to develop scientific criteria for differentiating the corresponding regimes.