This Article examines the ways in which various constitutional structures grant and constrain emergency powers. Specifically, the Article examines how a country defines the emergency powers of its chief executive and whether that definition is formal or informal. The Article also explores what effect the distinction between formal and informal powers has on a constitutional system’s ability to prevent a devolution of constitutional norms. The Article undertakes this inquiry by examining the use of emergency powers in different countries and at different times. It examines the constitutions of Germany’s Weimar Republic, Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth French Republic, and Indira Gandhi’s rule in India, as well as specific examples from United States history…

In January 2024, following a series of dramatic public security incidents, including the escape from prison of Adolfo Macias (“Fito”), the leader of the violent Ecuadoran gang Los Choneros, and the takeover of an Ecuadoran television station during a live broadcast, the newly elected government of Daniel Noboa declared a “state of internal warfare” in the country.  Through Presidential Decree 111, he designated 22 violent criminal entities operating in the country as “terrorist organizations” and authorized the employment of the Armed Forces in a broad range of security operations from supporting the control of the nation’s interior and borders, to deployment in prisons, to operations against illegal mining…

President Erdoğan and the AKP government initiated a comprehensive restoration process immediately after the failed coup in mid-July 2016. In fact, the country has been experiencing a very comprehensive and violent regime transformation since this time. I assert that recent political developments paved the way for institutionalization of a ‘plebiscitary presidential regime’ that depends on a particular combination of supreme power of the leader, an extremely weak parliament, and elections of a plebiscitary character. In this context, the paper aims to shed light on the role of the new strategic legalism which allows rule of law to be replaced by a rule by law approach, the executive prerogative principle to be dominant, and the law to be used for demobilization, all playing a highly critical role in the suppression of democratic opposition…

The objective of this article is to demonstrate how Colombia's mandatory preventive lock-down decrees during Covid-19 bypassed the constitutional controls designed to regulate states of exception. This situation resulted in a violation of the fundamental right to free movement. The methodology used in this study begins with an examination of the mandatory preventive lockdown decrees. It then continues with an analysis of the legal foundations on which these decrees were based to justify exceptional orders. Finally, the article reviews the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of Colombia and the Consejo de Estado, focusing on the reasons both courts were unable to exercise control over these decrees. The conclusion is that these decrees circumvented automatic constitutional controls, and any legal challenge against them proved ineffective due to procedural delays.…