Tormod Johansen

London Review of Books

“The​ European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its first judgment on 1 July 1961. Gerard Richard Lawless had been arrested four years earlier while attempting to travel from Ireland to Great Britain. Under a 1940 amendment to the Irish Offences against the State Act (1939), a government minister could order the detention without trial of ‘any particular person ... engaged in activities which, in his opinion, are prejudicial to the public peace and order or to the security of the state’. The Irish government brought these powers into force on 8 July 1957, during the period of IRA attacks known as the Irish Border Campaign. On 11 July, Lawless was arrested on suspicion of being a member of the IRA. The next day, the Irish minister of justice, Oscar Traynor, ordered his detention.”

Joachim Åhman

Verfassungsblog

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the debate about a possible NATO membership in Sweden, like in other neutral/non-aligned countries, has been intense. The ruling Social Democratic Party has been against a membership for a long time. On Sunday 15 May, it changed its position. Now everything points to a Swedish NATO membership.

Like Eoin Daly, who recently wrote a very interesting post on Verfassungsblog analysing the Irish situation, I am interested in the constitutional aspects of what is happening. A Swedish NATO membership would be a very far-reaching international commitment, and a significant change in a 200-year-old policy of (mainly) neutrality/non-alignment. It seems likely that the constitutional barriers for a membership are low: parliamentary approval with a simple majority vote. (…)

Tormod Otter Johansen

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica Vol. 96 (2021): The Return of the Exception

Legal analysis necessarily uses concepts, distinctions and typologies. These tools suffer challenges when the object of analysis or application is a crisis or emergency. The article looks into two examples of legal typologies of emergencies in the works of Gross and Ní Aiolaín and Agamben respectively. Based on this four levels of analysis for legal responses to emergencies is proposed: 1) explicit descriptions of actions by actors themselves, 2) positivist legal categories available in the context, 3) meta/comparative categories, and 4) philosophical/ontological concepts and categories that question or inquire into all the previous categories. The article concludes by discussing how these levels of analysis overlaps, merge and needs to be combined in order to grasp the complex phenomena of law in crisis.

Sari Kouvo & Tormod Otter Johansen

Ny Juridik, 3 (21), 7

I denna artikel av docenten och universitetslektorn i internationell rätt Sari Kouvo och jur.dr Tormod Otter Johansen båda vid juridiska institutionen Göteborgs universitet, ställs följande frågor. Vad är en kris? Vad är rättens roll i att hantera krisen? Hur kan rätten säkerställa en balansgång mellan att ge befogenheter för en effektiv hantering av en kris, samtidigt som den även bör begränsa vad politiska och andra aktörer gör under krisens täckmantel? Vilka konkreta lärdomar kan dras från den svenska hanteringen av covidkrisen som kan vara relevanta för vår framtida krishantering?