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Taming The Prince: Bringing Presidential Emergency Powers Under Law In Colombia, Andrea Scoseria Katz

Scholarship@WashULaw

Can courts check presidential power exercised in a crisis — and should they? The case of Colombia, which recently turned on its head a history of presidential overreach and judicial rubber-stamping, provides an answer in the affirmative. As in much of Latin America, throughout Colombia’s post-independence history, bloodshed fueled authoritarian tendencies, with presidents exploiting the need for “order” to centralize power. One critical weapon in the presidential toolkit was the power to declare a state of emergency. During the twentieth century, these decrees became a routine pretext for the President to govern unilaterally, acquiesced to by the legislature and rarely …