Noah Feldman, Columnist

U.S. Semi-Shutdown Is Mostly Voluntary, and Uniquely American

The loose, self-policed shutdown exempts huge swaths of the economy. We don’t know whether it will work.

March 24, 2020 at 4:19 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

A usually busy 5th Avenue is seen nearly empty on March 23, 2020 in New York City.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

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As more U.S. states roll out stay-at-home orders to combat the spread of coronavirus, it’s now possible to identify an emerging American model of such restrictions. The approach is notably less strict than Covid-19 measures adopted in other affected countries, not only autocratic China, but even democratic Italy. And although the model is sufficiently restrictive that it will have massive effects on the economy, it does not come close to a complete shutdown of economic activity.

The emerging American model has several distinctive elements. The first is that, while its contours are being specified in emergency orders issued first by local governments and now by state governments, it isn’t particularly coercive. Indeed, at least in this first iteration, the American model depends mostly on voluntary compliance.