Public law and the new emergencies: from covid to climate change

This Special Issue set out to consider a legal question of perennial significance that has acquired a new urgency in recent times. Public law, understood broadly as the law that regulates relations across the organs of the state and also between these organs and the general public – has always struggled to deal with the exceptional or emergency situation. For some the very measure of law is that its normal procedural means and substantive standards should prevail regardless of circumstances. What price the Rule of Law if law falls by the wayside or is stretched out of recognition just because it suits a public power to exercise an unregulated discretion in responding to a particular challenge? Yet some challenges really do pose unprecedented or unusual problems for government, and risk the long term health and viability of the polity, including its legal system, unless they are resolved. In other words, there is a threat both ways. The legal order and underlying security of the state will not easily survive too lax an approach to the exception, yet too rigid an adherence to normal standards can also pose dangers.