This chapter utilizes an existential perspective to educate readers on the importance of responsible decision-making and creating meaning in life. The author explores how social and emotional intelligences help foster wellbeing and create meaning in life. However, decisions can be affected by negative emotions and desire for risk-taking. This chapter discusses the negative psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it caused existential crisis for many around the world, influencing emotional responses and thus decision-making habits. Recovery and wellbeing can be found again in the ability to create meaning from the years of death and psychological destruction.

Loneliness can be found in many life experiences, such as loss, rejection, illness, failure, as well as in success, creativity, or meditation. This chapter is unique because it includes loneliness as part of the social and emotional intelligences. The author helps readers shift their perception of loneliness from something to be avoided or defended against to a necessary exploration of their solitude in the universe. Solitude is argued as a necessary experience for developing social and emotional intelligences. This chapter explores the benefits of solitude for wellbeing and growth across the lifespan.

Although commerce in the United States has largely reopened since the initial waves of COVID-19, both individuals and businesses continue to suffer from the effects of the pandemic. Some of this impact is directly related to the health effects of the virus. Much of the impact is related to the economic consequences of the pandemic, including government-imposed shutdowns, gathering restrictions and other mitigation measures, and the ambient fear of contagion that led people to restrict their interactions outside the home. COVID-19 has been, in short, a public health and economic catastrophe, the recovery from which has been steady, but still very slow and much incomplete. It is also likely that this pandemic will not be the last we encounter.

As with other damaging substances and events, the law typically handles these kinds of crises with a mix of regulation and tort liability. For many reasons fundamental to tort law, including problems of causation and proof and of the nexus between economic impact and the precise community and individual effects of the virus, tort law has not been an adequate tool to address the fallout of the pandemic. Indeed, despite predictions to the contrary, we have seen relatively few tort claims and fewer successful suits. Consequently, the liability effects of the pandemic on businesses, including on insurance companies, have been more limited than what one might have imagined in the very early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nonetheless, it would be misleading to draw as a lesson that the pandemic’s economic impacts on individuals and small businesses have been only moderately consequential. At base, individuals and businesses have not been compensated adequately either by private industry or by the government. (And, as to governmental compensation, even the eye-popping numbers reflected in major federal legislation from 2020 to 2022 has left so much of the population, particularly the most societally vulnerable, exposed economically (to go along with their illness exposure). As new variants continue to prolong the pandemic, this vulnerability will expectedly grow and the law should be ready to respond.

The basic argument of this chapter is that the current structure of American tort law cannot effectively address the significant economic consequences on individuals and businesses, at least those consequences that have traditionally been seen as calling for redress through private law structures such as liability law. However, there are other mechanisms – tort alternatives – have been applied successfully in other extraordinary and consequential episodes that, likewise, could not be addressed effectively through tort law. Such schemes span the spectrum from no-fault insurance mechanisms to compensation programs, of the sort that we saw in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 (and in other periods of American history). We do not think that the answer to this pandemic predicament is a “cut-and-paste” arrangement whereby compensation schemes should simply be used to displace tort law. We appreciate that this complex situation calls for nuance and balance. Nonetheless, we initiate this important conversation about what to do about the unaddressed impacts of COVID-19 on individuals and businesses (especially smaller ones) and, as well, what to do about what so many tort law scholars working in the law and economics paradigm usually call the ex ante incentive problem, that is, how to ensure that appropriate precautions are taken to minimize exposure and damage.

We suggest in this chapter that serious consideration should be given to replacing tort in this context with an administrative compensation scheme, one that is better equipped than tort law to deal with both ex post compensation and ex ante incentives. We suggest that the COVID-19 liability dilemma bears the key hallmarks of other mass emergencies that have galvanized state and federal governments to adopt tort-replacement schemes in the past. Namely, we identify four such hallmarks: (1) harms to the judicial system caused by a vast number of claims arriving over a short period, because of the widespread, systemic nature of the harm; (2) harms to potential plaintiffs faced at once with great need and substantial obstacles to recovery; (3) harms to a defendant-industry (namely retail businesses in this case); and (4) harms to the economy and society more generally. While the presence of these characteristics does not necessarily mean that tort replacement is warranted, it is enough to suggest that it should be considered.

After surveying various examples in which the state has replaced tort in response to one or more of these four categories of harms, we argue that replacing tort in this context is sensible and normatively desirable. We respond to likely objections and conclude with a preliminary discussion of the process by which we might replace tort, the transition to such a replacement, and how we might measure or evaluate our progress.

Is it possible that we have more capacity for change than we are currently expressing? This chapter begins by assessing the historical importance of the Covid pandemic, arguing that it helped revise how we look at the economy. If the way the economy works can be recreated to eliminate the risk of a viral infection, then it can presumably be recreated for the sake of other, equally desirable social goals. At first, one might think these changes signal the return of industrial policy, but I argue that world building differs from industrial policy because it operates at the level of the background conditions under which economic life takes place. These background conditions include the fight against climate change, the provision of skills and political stability and the creation of comparative advantage for national industries. In the end, however, the most general background conditions are formed at the global level. They are the framework conditions of global economic integration, and the need to shape the framework conditions for economic activity is not unrelated to the fact that other states are also trying to shape them. Indeed, both the United States and China believe in the idea of a world system articulating the relations of economic power and dependence at the heart of the global economy.

Contemporary issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Big Tech offer opportunities to recapitulate and extend the book’s insights in this concluding chapter. More specifically, debates over public health and digital technology reveal the practical implications attending more theoretic inquiries about private actors’ status in constitutional politics. The weightiness of these issues thus supports increased urgency to study the position of private actors vis-à-vis the constitution and brings to the fore the particular value of the book’s republican framework in this enterprise. The republican framework may offer guidance regarding the contexts and goals to which horizontal application is suited, as well as the ways in which it may be further supported as a practical and a normative matter. By appreciating the ways in which horizontal application is republican, constitution-makers and courts might shore up this practice by taking steps to make it even more republican. This may come through renewed emphasis on the legislative function or contestation more generally in constitutional politics.

Like information disseminated through online platforms, infectious diseases can cross international borders as they track the movement of people (and sometimes animals and goods) and spread globally. Hence, their control and management have major implications for international relations, and international law. Drawing on this analogy, this chapter looks to global health governance to formulate suggestions for the governance of online platforms. Successes in global health governance suggest that the principle of tackling low-hanging fruit first to build trust and momentum towards more challenging goals may extend to online platform governance. Progress beyond the low-hanging fruit appears more challenging: For one, disagreement on the issue of resource allocation in the online platform setting may lead to “outbreaks” of disinformation being relegated to regions of the world that may not be at the top of online platforms’ market priorities lists. Secondly, while there may be wide consensus on the harms of infectious disease outbreaks, the harms from the spread of disinformation are more contested. Relying on national definitions of disinformation would hardly yield coherent international cooperation. Global health governance would thus suggest that an internationally negotiated agreement on standards as it relates to disinformation may be necessary.

How has Britain been transformed since the financial crisis of 2008?