Circuit rejects constitutional challenge to Ebola quarantines

This is a timely ruling. The Court of Appeals takes up quarantine restrictions, though they involve a prior pandemic, Ebola, where two individuals who had returned from Africa during the 2014-2016 pandemic were required to quarantine for 21 days. The Court of Appeals does not actually rule on whether these quarantine orders are illegal. It says instead that the law at the time was not clearly established such that Connecticut officials, including the Governor, can invoke qualified immunity.

The case is Liberian Community Assn. of Connecticut v. LaMont, issued on August 14. The plaintiffs were Ph.D. candidates from the Yale School of Public Health who went to Liberia analyze data collected during the Ebola outbreak. We have other plaintiffs also. When they returned to the United States, they were ordered to quarantine for 21 days, and police officers were deployed outside their apartments to make sure they complied with this directive. Plaintiffs never tested positive for Ebola. 

Plaintiffs claim the quarantine orders violated due process and the Fourth Amendment because their liberties were restricted. The problem for plaintiffs is qualified immunity, which says government officials cannot be sued unless they violated clearly-established case law. "Clearly-established" means that prior case law is closely on point such that government officials are on at least constructive notice that they are violating the law. Over Judge Chin's dissent, Judge Livingston says there is no clearly-established law in this area, i.e., civil commitments in the context of infectious diseases. While the court has discretion to first determine whether Connecticut officials violated the law, a ruling that would thus create clearly-established law for the next quarantine case, the Court of Appeals chooses not to do so. Of course, such a ruling would make life easier for courts that take up the quarantine orders arising from COVID-19, but since the Court heard oral argument in this case more than two years ago, perhaps it was more important to get the ruling out once and for all.

Judge Chin dissents, arguing that the law in this area is clearly-established. He notes that the Supreme Court long ago ruled that the government cannot isolate people during an epidemic in a way that goes "so far beyond what was reasonably necessary for the safety of the public," and, other cases in general hold that "commitment for any purpose constitutes a significant deprivation of liberty that requires due process protection." In 1996, the Second Circuit held in Jolly v. Coughlin, a prison quarantine case, that inmates could not be held in medical keeplock where they did not have active tuberculosis and could be actively monitored through other means. Second Circuit case law qualifies as clearly-established law. At least as plead in the lawsuit, under Rule 12, plaintiffs plead that defendants violated clearly-established law under the Constitution as they claim the isolation was unnecessary and there were less restrictive alternatives to protect others from Ebola.