MUST READ: Your Constitutional Rights During an Ebola (or other) Outbreak

Yournewswire With rising concern nationally about Ebola haemorrhagic fever, the possibility of some very limited quarantines looms as efforts are underway to contain the disease. But what are your rights under such conditions? In short, state governments, and not the federal government, have most of the power to place people in isolation or quarantine under certain circumstances. Isolation separates people who are known to be ill from those who aren’t sick. Quarantine separates people suspected of being exposed to an illness or biological agent from the general population. Your individual rights are very limited in these circumstances, unless you can prove the government action is arbitrary. The topic of Ebola and the Constitution is starting to get some play in legal publications; however, the precedents over the government’s power to isolate citizens go back almost 200 years. Link: List of Federal and State quarantine laws The Constitution doesn’t directly list the power to isolate or quarantine people as a power given to the federal government, so the power to take these severe measures is reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment. In 1824, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Gibbons v.



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