Constitution, state of emergency and public health Administration: some problems

Abstract

The consideration of emergency powers usually develops around recognized divisions between normality and suspension, legality and necesity or norm and exception. However, the peculiar characteristics of the emergency caused by the pandemic crisis of Covid-19, as seen by the impact and factual uncertainty of the health risks, impose a sequential approach to a dynamic crisis scenario, focused on the normative processes that have been sustaining the social confinement and deconfinement. It is, therefore, important to understand how, through the constitutional emergency, it was created an exceptional legal normativity oriented towards the confinement of people; and how that, once the constitutional emergency has expired, another exceptional legal normativity has been organized and implemented for the phase of gradual deconfinement of the same people. This contribution seeks to analyse some fundamental problems emerging from such relation.