The recent global Coronavirus pandemic has turned academic attention to extraordinary legislative instruments. The unprecedented scale of the pandemic put existing legal instruments to the test, which – in many cases – they have failed. This resulted in the rise of various forms of emergency legislation, often described as previously unimaginable, unconstitutional, dangerously altering the relationship between the legislative power and the executive power, factually deconstructing the legal system, and so on. Not only do these extraordinary legal instruments violate previous legislative practice and constitutional rules, but they also deviate from the principles established in legal theory and the philosophy of law, thus creating a disturbing gap between established theoretical notions and political practice.
However, it would be mistaken to solely blame the pandemic emergency laws for the crisis of standard legislation that we are observing. Instead, they are symptoms of a more general trend. The COVID-19 pandemic may be seen as a sample tube that exposes much more vividly phenomena that have already been noticed before it, such as the inflation of law, the juridification of public life, and decodification. In fact, many legal systems have long made use of extraordinary legislative instruments of various types, including:
•Private legislation: laws that are addressed to particular individuals or companies and usually grant them benefits from the government, such as pensions, military honours, land titles, relief of liability, as well as claims against the government for damages, immigration and naturalisation cases.
•Temporary legislation (also known as “sunset legislation”): laws whose duration is limited at the time of enactment. From the perspective of drafting methodology, this effect can be achieved by various techniques.
•Experimental legislation: laws enacted for a limited period of time, on a smallscale basis, in derogation from existing law and subject to a periodic or final evaluation. Once evaluated, an experimental law that reveals positive outcomes can be adapted in conformity with the observed results and transformed into a permanent act.
•Ad hoc legislation: laws that are the result of the legislator's attempt to achieve a specific short-term political goal, in an individual case, by excluding the applicable legal principles or by changing them if they stand in the way of that goal. These may be enacted for a variety of reasons, including overruling a particular line of court judgments.
•Emergency legislation: laws enacted for a specific purpose, for a limited duration, and usually delegating a great deal of authority to the executive. They allow to handle emergency situations without triggering the dreaded constitutional emergency clauses.

The workshop aims to advance our understanding of special legislation in different legal cultures and prepare theoretical grounds for their critical analyses. It is open to submissions on, but not limited to, topics such as:
•Various forms of extraordinary legislative instruments in different legal systems, such as Massnahmengesetz in Germany, specustawy in Poland, leyes medidas in Spanish-speaking countries, private acts in Anglo-Saxon countries etc.
•Historical and comparative analyses of different forms of special legislation,
•Formal, procedural, and substantive distinctive characteristics of special legislation, such as temporality, specificity, instrumental character, etc.
•The risks posed by special legislation for human rights and crucial legal values, such as stability, certainty, equity, legality, etc.
•The application of special legislation by courts, administrative bodies, and other types of public officials,
•Cross-disciplinary aspects of special legislation, including economic, sociological, political, ethical, etc.
Submissions with a short abstract (up to 300 words) should be sent by the 26th of April to Mateusz Zeifert (mateusz.zeifert@us.edu.pl).