As the 2021-2022 school year commences, universities across the
county are exploring ways to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on
their campuses. Given the wide availability of COVID-19 vaccines
recommended by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention,
including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson,
hundreds of institutions for higher education have issued policies
requiring students to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 prior to
the start of the fall semester. However, these policies have
increasingly faced barriers to enforcement, including lawsuits and
state-specific legislation barring mandatory vaccination.
In this article, we will discuss this novel conflict as it
relates to higher education and how state laws are implicated, with
a focus on Ohio and the Midwest. More specifically, we will
illustrate the backdrop in which the Ohio legislature and its
public universities are operating by discussing the first court
case to address a challenge
