Urgency and Exceptional Times

This chapter focuses on emergency law as an institution of official time. Legal systems tend to include mechanisms and strategies for accelerating decision-making and legislative processes in response to emergencies. A state of emergency is often declared to enable swift action and a return to normalcy. The chapter analyzes how accelerative processes, both within and beyond the law, affect a legal system's temporality. In preparing for emergencies, often a sense of urgency emerges that further accelerates legislative processes – even in a state of normalcy. Responses to terrorism through emergency legislation have particularly contributed to expanding urgency within the legal system and accelerating legislative procedures. A critical concept of extra-constitutional urgency is developed to examine how, in contemporary emergency law, urgency can significantly weaken constitutional principles. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how to distinguish extra-constitutional urgency from other forms of urgency, especially in the context of climate change.