22122508_omslag120px
Rss

Law and Method

About this journal  

Subscribe to the email alerts for this journal here to receive notifications when a new issue is at your disposal.

September, 2021 Expand all abstracts
Artikel

Access_open Time and Law in the Post-COVID-19 Era: The Usefulness of Experimental Law

Special Issue Experimental Legislation in Times of Crisis, Sofia Ranchordas & Bart van Klink (eds.)

Keywords COVID-19, time and law, law-making, parliament, government, legal certainty
Authors Erik Longo
AbstractAuthor's information

    The COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020 impelling us to reconsider the basic principles of constitutional law like the separation of power, the rule of law, human rights protection, etc. The two most pressing legal issues that have attracted the attention of legal scholars so far are, on the one hand, the different regulatory policies implemented by governments and, on the other, the balance among the branches of government in deciding matters of the emergency. The pandemic has determined a further and violent acceleration of the legislature’s temporal dimension and the acknowledgement that, to make legislation quicker, parliament must permanently displace its legislative power in favour of government. Measures adopted to tackle the outbreak and recover from the interruption of economic and industrial businesses powerfully confirm that today our societies are more dependent on the executives than on parliaments and, from a temporal perspective, that the language of the law is substantially the present instead of the future. Against this background, this article discusses how the prevalence of governments’ legislative power leads to the use of temporary and experimental legislation in a time, like the pandemic, when the issue of ‘surviving’ becomes dominant.


Erik Longo
Prof. Dr. Erik Longo is associate professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Florence.
Artikel

Access_open GMO Regulation in Crisis – The Experimental Potential of Regulation (EU) 2020/1043 on Covid-19 in Addressing Both a Crisis and a ­Pandemic

Special Issue Experimental Legislation in Times of Crisis Sofia Ranchordás & Bart van Klink (eds.)

Keywords experimental legislation, regulatory knowledge, GMO regulation, evaluation
Authors Lonneke Poort and Willem-Jan Kortleven
AbstractAuthor's information

    In this article, we analyse Regulation (EU) 2020/1043 on Covid-19 against the backdrop of the current deadlock in EU-regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We build on temporary and experimental legislation scholarship and employ a normative framework of regulatory knowledge. The Covid-19 Regulation aims at speeding up the development of GMO-based Covid-19 treatments or vaccines by temporarily suspending requirements that otherwise would have made for time-consuming and burdensome authorization processes. Although the Regulation lacks an explicit experimental purpose, we hypothesize that experiences with its functioning may be utilized in evaluation processes serving attempts to change the GMO legal framework. As such, it may fulfil a latent experimental function. We reflect on the types of knowledge that are relevant when evaluating experimental legislation and developing regulation more generally and argue that the inclusion of social knowledge is pertinent in dealing with complex issues such as GMO regulation. Experimental law literature focuses on gathering evidence-based knowledge about the functioning of legislation but virtually neglects knowledge about different experiences and value appreciations of various societal actors and social-contextual mechanisms. We propose that such social knowledge be included in the design of experimental legislation and that evaluation be approached bottom-up instead of top-down.


Lonneke Poort
Lonneke Poort is Associate Professor at the department of Sociology, Theory and Methodology of Law at Erasmus School of Law.

Willem-Jan Kortleven
Willem-Jan Kortleven is Assistant Professor at the department of Sociology, Theory and Methodology of Law at Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam.