'The Ebola Nurse': Quarantining the 'African Virus'

On October 24, 2014, Kaci Hickox, a nurse for Doctors Without Borders, was planning to return to her home in Maine from an extended visit to Sierra Leone in West Africa where she had treated Ebola patients. She had a connecting flight in Newark, NJ and was detained at the airport against her will because of concerns that she may have been carrying a low-grade fever and was therefore believed to be symptomatic of the Ebola virus. She was then placed in an isolation tent in NJ before finally being released to go home.

Upon her return to Maine, Hickox was subjected to a 21-day state-imposed home quarantine. She ignored it. Perhaps more accurately, she defied it. She chose instead to take on a legal fight for science and for civil liberties.

Ms. Hickox was represented by Norman Siegel and Steven J. Hyman, a Lafayette alumnus from the class of 1962, in filing a lawsuit against the state of Maine. Mr. Hyman was quickly drawn into the media frenzy surrounding the Hickox case, being interviewed by numerous print and news media sources. In a statement to ABC news, he shared her intentions, "Going forward she does not intend to abide by the quarantine imposed by Maine officials because she is not a risk to others. She is asymptomatic and under all the protocols cannot be deemed a medical risk of being contagious to anyone." Under Siegel and Hyman'a counsel, Hickox won her case in Maine, and Mr. Hyman will visit with us to tell the story.

Steven J. Hyman was a history major at Lafayette and went on to law school at Columbia University. Now serving as the chair of litigation for the Manhattan firm McLaughlin & Stern, Hyman is a frequent lecturer and panelist on civil liberties issues. He recently gave a talk on campus, sharing his experience having argued the New York v. Quarles case in front of the Supreme Court in 1984, which established the "public safety exception" to the Miranda rule.