Research Themes
An overview of our research topics
Overview of the Project
Rule of law and human rights are under pressure worldwide. The political and legal landscape is changing dramatically, with situations of crisis becoming a recurrent presence in the life of our polities. We witness a resurgence of emergency legislation and measures that states employ to tackle the harmful effects caused by numerous disruptions: from financial instability to terrorist activity, pandemics, and military threats.
Traditionally, emergency is understood as a mechanism with temporary and limited effects on legal systems: once the crisis recedes, fundamental rights and constitutional processes are restored. EMERGE argues, however, that emergency has long-lasting effects that persist beyond the crisis. These effects reshape our understanding of human rights, the rule of law, and constitutional practices.
EMERGE advances a paradigmatic shift in the study of emergency by offering an original re-evaluation of its impact on the operation of law. It provides a much-needed legal historical explanation of how the experience of emergency shapes constitutional and political cultures across Europe. Through a chronological examination and timeline of emergency practices in relation to economic, social, and political crises, EMERGE critically re-evaluates key moments in European constitutional history from 1914 to 2020.
EMERGE offers a comprehensive analysis of emergency by forging a unique multidisciplinary approach that draws on comparative legal history (contextual legal history), legal theory (law in action, law in context, narrative jurisprudence), and digital humanities (similarity, network, and sentiment analysis). Rather than focusing exclusively on legal rules, it studies the agency of individuals, actors, and subjects of emergency legislation, and reconfigures emergency as a multilayered socio-legal phenomenon shaped by social actors and political choices within constitutional cultures.
Contexts of Emergency
This research cluster situates the study of emergency within the historical contexts that shaped the enactment of emergency legislation. It places the experience of emergency at the heart of our understanding of constitutional law. To do so, we employ legal-historical methods such as archival research, contextual interpretation, and digital tools—including semantic analysis and distant reading. These approaches are applied to a curated corpus of archival materials related to emergency declarations, including parliamentary debates, government records, and decisions by public authorities. By combining traditional and digital methodologies, this cluster aims to uncover how emergency was constructed, debated, and implemented across different legal and political settings.
Laws of Emergency
Under this heading one situates not just the study of legal rules, but also the intellectual processes of rationalisation of emergency measures and their legal justification. This stream is seeking to unearth the common core of European emergency in public law, by focusing on existing similarities and differences within constitutional and public law across historical legal contexts. It thus draws on comparative law theory and comparative legal history, aiming to seize through contextual analysis the distinctive features of a European common history of emergency.
Actors of Emergency
Within this stream there is a focus on the operation of emergency and its impact on actors (individuals affected by emergency) and institutions, with a particular focus on judicial independence. Judicial independence is a useful indicator of the dynamics engendered by emergency in either corroding legal protections of individuals or enhancing the competencies and jurisdiction of state authorities. This stream will approach the socio-legal life of emergency, drawing on law in action methodology and will reconstruct ‘prototypical cases’, giving rise of a thick, ethnographic-like description of the historical moments analysed.