Legal resilience and legislative emergency preparation in Finland

In this article, I analyse the legal practice of Finnish legislative emergency preparation and its principles. In approaching the principles of legislative emergency preparation, a distinction is made between the role that law takes in promoting the resilience of society and the resilience of the legal system itself. By differentiating societal and legal resilience, the article approaches legislative emergency preparation as something that includes both forms of resilience and objectives specific to them. My research question concerns how recent Finnish legislation on responding and preventing hybrid threats affects the balance between these two types of objectives. To approach this phenomenon, I define two temporal principles of emergency governance: the temporal limits of the state of emergency and the temporal distinctiveness of the state of normalcy and emergency. I argue that recent legislation, in which concerns of societal resilience tend to enjoy preference, contradict these two temporal principles.