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Disaster Law Commons

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Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Disaster Law

When Protest Is The Disaster: Constitutional Implications Of State And Local Emergency Power, Karen Pita Loor Oct 2019

When Protest Is The Disaster: Constitutional Implications Of State And Local Emergency Power, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

The President’s use of emergency authority has recently ignited concern among civil rights groups over national executive emergency power. However, state and local emergency authority can also be dangerous and deserves similar attention. This article demonstrates that, just as we watch over the national executive, we must be wary of and check on state and local executives — and their emergency management law enforcement actors — when they react in crisis mode. This paper exposes and critiques state executives’ use of emergency power and emergency management mechanisms to suppress grassroots political activity and suggests avenues to counter that abuse. I …


Manufactured Emergencies, Robert Tsai Jan 2019

Manufactured Emergencies, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Emergencies are presumed to be unusual affairs, but the United States has been in one state of emergency or another for the last forty years. That is a problem. The erosion of democratic norms has led to not simply the collapse of the traditional conceptual boundary between ordinary rule and emergency governance, but also the emergence of an even graver problem: the manufactured crisis. In an age characterized by extreme partisanship, institutional gridlock, and technological manipulation of information, it has become exceedingly easy and far more tempting for a President to invoke extraordinary power by ginning up exigencies. To reduce …


Law Matters, Even To The Executive, Julian Davis Mortenson Apr 2014

Law Matters, Even To The Executive, Julian Davis Mortenson

Michigan Law Review

In both constitutional and international law, many legal rules cannot be implemented without what most people would describe as the voluntary compliance of their target. Is that really “law”? Or is rule compliance in such circumstances just an expression of “interests”? Forget jurisprudence for the moment. As a practical matter, what does it mean to work as a lawyer in a field where the rules are not coercively enforced against private parties by an independent judiciary whose orders are implemented by a cooperative executive? This question has particularly high stakes for national security policy, where we find judicial deference at …