Rethinking Medico-Legal Borders: From international to internal histories

The response to coronavirus has starkly revealed the significance of internal movement and its regulation. Yet the focus of scholarship on medico-legal border control remains almost exclusively on international movement. This project addresses that major gap by researching the regulation of internal movement in past and present pandemic times, with a focus on plague, influenza, SARS and coronavirus in Australia, and in comparison with Hong Kong. It will interrogate the ambiguous internal/international borders of ships in quarantine in the past and in the coronavirus present. Bringing law and history together, this project will clarify how internal movement has been, and can best be, lawfully restricted.