The LaSE group organizes a stream at this years Northern European Conference on Emergency and Disaster Studies, hosted by Mid Sweden University and organized by the Risk and Crisis Research Centre 21–23 September 2021.

Below is a description of the stream, and click here for more information and in order to submit an abstract. Deadline for submission is May 23, 2021.

Law in Crisis? Analysing the Challenge of Making Laws Work in and after Disasters and Crises

The panel takes stock of how law functions in crisis. Key questions that the panel seeks to answer are: How are laws – including national, regional and international laws – used as instruments to deal with crisis? How do laws enable or restrain action by governments and other actors during crisis? How can laws help protect democracy, rights and freedoms and institutional accountability during and after crisis? That is, what is the ‘optimal balance’ of executive power and constitutional safeguards for crisis situations? And, importantly, how do we study what law does in crisis? What methods do we use to decipher law in crisis?

While the intention of the panel is not to focus primarily or solely on the Covid-19 pandemic, it can here be used to exemplify what law in crisis can be taken to mean. A comparative outlook shows that although most countries have undertaken similar measures to deal with the health crisis, the legal strategies that have enabled these measures have been quite different. National legal strategies have ranged from continuing business as usual, adopting a series of regulations using either regular law or different forms of emergency power, to proclaiming states of emergencies. Focusing just on Europe, governments have also chosen very different strategies vis-à-vis the EU and its civil protection frameworks and the Council of Europe and derogations from the European Convention on Human Rights. There has also been opportunism: the power of governments and their security forces have been enhanced, independent oversight mechanisms have been sidelined and regulations are being fast tracked while the attention of opposition groups and human rights watchdogs is elsewhere.

The rule of law, the idea that nobody’s above the law and that law protects the democratic system, is fundamental for contemporary societies. However, what the Covid19 pandemic shows is that there is not one way to uphold the rule of law in a crisis, but also that it is not evident to uphold the rule of law in the midst of a crisis. The tensions or ruptures in the rule of law and especially its role in protecting democracy are particularly prevalent in situations where a crisis lingers on, overlaps with or transforms into other crises, puts a strain on basic societal functions, or is normalized. Understanding and analyzing these developments is important for legal scholars, but also for all those interested in understanding societal responses to, and resilience in, crises.

For this panel, we welcome especially papers that focus on how contemporary legal systems – national, regional and international – function in and may change in crisis, especially in prolonged, complex crisis situations. We also welcome papers that focus on what methodologies to use and how to analyze the effects of such crisis situations on contemporary legal systems.