After recent terrorist attacks, French political institutions have been undergoing legislative and constitutional amendments that are part of a specific legal category which could well be termed “crisis laws”. While these laws often share the vocabulary of a “state of exception”, engaging its political and philosophical references, they must yet be distinguished from it. Whereas a “state of exception” interrupts the rule of law in principle, the laws adopted in several countries following terrorist attacks have melded the state of exception into the legal framework. The rule of law is no longer interrupted: the rule of law is modified and the exception becomes the rule. The focus of this conference, which will adopt a comparative point of view, is to question this transformation, not necessarily with the aim to evaluate it, but in order to think it through while drawing attention to the inadaptability of traditional legal and philosophical categories in a new/changing political world.

Programme

10:00 Opening Keynote Lecture : Prof Carl Wellman (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in Saint Louis ), Conceptual Analysis and Emergency Legislation

11:20 AM – Panel 1. Crisis Legislation in the UK : Policy Choices and International Constraints

Moderator: Prof Lucia Zedner (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford)

• Mr David Anderson QC (Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation), Independent review of anti-terrorism laws
• Prof Helen Fenwick (Human Rights Centre, University of Durham), Confronting the failures of non-trial-based counter-terror measures 

2:30 PM Panel 2. Crisis Legislation: Comparative Overview of the Current State of Affairs

Moderator: Prof Karma Nabulsi (St Edmund Hall College, University of Oxford)

• Prof Olivier Beaud (Institut Michel Villey, University Paris II Panthéon-Assas), Anything goes: how does French Law deal with the state of emergency (1955-2015)?
• Prof Kent Roach (Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy, University of Toronto Faculty of Law), American exceptionalism in responding to the ISIS? 

4 :50 PM - Concluding remarks : Prof. John Gardner FBA (University College, University of Oxford)