PROFESSOR DONELSON RECENTLY SPOKE AT INTERNATIONAL ONLINE CONFERENCE ON COVID-19 RESPONSE
January 2021 — Professor Raff Donelson recently participated as a panelist in a webinar entitled A Question of Trust? Hard vs. Soft Law in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Hosted by the University of Salford, the webinar examined different governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This international webinar compared governmental responses to the pandemic around the world, through the lens of soft and hard law. While soft law approaches favor offering guidance to individuals to achieve desired outcomes, hard law approaches favor civil and criminal penalties to guarantee compliance. Professor Donelson spoke about the American response to the pandemic, which has significantly varied over time and across state lines. The American responses mixed both hard and soft law approaches with limited success. Professor Donelson was joined by Professors Gina Gustavsson (Upssala University), Tom Hickman QC (University College London), Guillermo Jimenez (Adolfo Ibáñez University), Kristen Rundle (University of Melbourne), Benjamin van Rooij (University of Amsterdam), Pauline Westerman (University of Groningen), and Olof Wilske (Uppsala University). The panel was organized and moderated by Professors Patricia Mindus (Uppsala University) and Paolo Sandro (Salford).
Professor Raff Donelson is an Assistant Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law who earned his J.D. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. Professor Donelson’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, constitutional law, and criminal law. His more theoretical research interests include metaethics and general jurisprudence, while his doctrinal work focuses on constitutional protections for criminals and the accused. His scholarship includes contributions to books published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, as well as articles in U.S. and foreign law reviews and in philosophy journals such as Metaphilosophy. He has been an invited speaker at numerous legal and philosophy conferences and has addressed both U.S. and foreign academic audiences. His work is featured in Legal-Phi, which is an online venue that profiles the work of rising stars in the field of legal philosophy.