Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's

news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.h. That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today I'm talking to Lainey Rutko, who's both a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a lawyer.

She's an expert in how the law works in the setting of an emergency like the coronavirus pandemic.

In our discussion, she shares her thoughts about recent legal developments between states and the federal government,

between one state and another state, and between governments at every level and their citizens.

Let's listen.

Professor Rutko, thank you very much for joining me.

I want to go right to the legal issues that you're expert on and ask you what people are to make

of all the news day after day of the very intrusive things that government can do to control

the spread of a disease. Sure. I'm happy to speak to that. And these are extraordinary times.

And it does feel like every day we're hearing about some new power or alleged power that government

has. So one reason that we're hearing about all of these

different types of governmental power is because each level of government in the United States,

federal, state, and local has the power to give itself certain temporary legal authorities

when there's an emergency. And we're now in a

place where the federal government, all 50 state governments and many of the local governments

...