030654 SE Emergency Laws in Comparative Perspective (2021W)

Do exceptional times require exceptional measures? And if so, how can we limit the inevitable damage to the ordinary legal and political system? These old constitutional questions are often conflated with the recent phenomenon of global terrorism, but they pertain to a much broader set of threats to the integrity of state and society, from global health crises, natural disasters, war, economic collapse to, more controversially, migration and related issues.

This course offers a broad historical and geographic overview of the concept of emergency laws from the Roman republic to contemporary times, and from liberal democracies to autocracies. Perhaps counter-intuitively, explicit emergency laws are not the prerogative of (Western) liberal constitutional democracies, but can be found and are taken seriously by decision-makers in very different types of states. Balancing rights, procedural safeguards and freedom with security in order to better respond to existential threats turns out to be a fairly universal functional challenge of any effective state.

In order to better understand how the State can or should respond to international terrorism and other security threats we will examine different theories of emergency powers, illustrated by international case studies of exceptional crises. Furthermore we will examine how different responses to exceptional security threats have challenged liberal concepts of democracy and the rule of law and, in some cases, international human rights law. This underlying balancing is contrasted with the similar but distinct calculation occurring in non-liberal entities.