Former UK Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption, one of the seemingly few lawyers critical of the lockdown measures, has summarised the COVID-19 situation most eloquently in this radio interview, and he would answer his critics like this:
What I say to them: I’m not a scientist, but it’s the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said and to analyse it for themselves and draw commonsense conclusions. We are all perfectly capable of doing that, and there is no particular reason why the scientific nature of the problem, that should mean that we have to resign our liberty into the hands of scientists. We all have critical faculties and it’s rather important in a moment of national panic that we maintain them.
https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/lord-sumption-discussing-the-police-response-to-coronavirus
In this interview he says:
The problem about using law as your instrument is that law requires definition, exact definition, and it works in categories. So, if you do this not voluntarily, but compulsorily, you are bound to have laws which make perfect sense in some contexts, and not in others. The problem about law is that it excludes commonsense. Now the Prime Minister has said in the House of Commons this afternoon, that he trusts the British to use their commonsense. But you can’t say to a policeman you must arrest somebody or fine them if he’s using commonsense and not otherwise. The whole legal approach invites a collection of completely arbitrary rules unrelated to the underlying purpose of the regulations, and you couldn’t have a more perfect illustration of that than the incredibly complex, utterly arbitrary distinctions contained in the government’s document this afternoon, dinstinguishing between meeting one person and meeting two people, between meeting one person in your back garden and meeting one person in the street outside your front garden. I mean these are illustrations of the kind of ridiculous distinctions that you get when instead of resorting to commonsense you resort to law. … I have every confidence that our sense of preservation and commonsense will enable us to get through this without the nanny state telling us at every point what we can and can’t do, especially when so much of what they are saying actually makes no sense at all.
https://youtu.be/86P7EEJeNKM?t=337
