This article seeks to assess the legal legacy of one of British India’s most significant emergency acts: Act XI of 1857, also known as the State Offences Act. Although introduced during the Indian Uprising of 1857, it will be argued that the extra-judicial provisions contained in this act exerted a strong influence on the legal character of post-1857 ‘special’ or exceptional colonial criminal legislation, an influence that continued to be reflected in the punitive emergency laws set in place in post-colonial India. The long-term historical significance of Act XI will be illustrated by examining some of the more notable pieces of punitive or repressive legislation enacted in colonial and post-colonial India, namely the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867, the 1915 Defence of India (Criminal Law Amendment) Act, the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, the Defence of India Act, 1962, and, more recently, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1985.

This article analyses how emergency legislation has affected law-making and regulatory quality principles (RQPs) before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021) from stakeholders’ perspectives. It takes Slovakia as a case study, as this country was considered a high performer in the adoption of RQPs before the crisis, while empirical findings suggest a subsequent decline in their use. We argue that formal RQPs are not deeply embedded and are vulnerable to crises. In doing so, we conceptually distinguish between standard (fully following the RQPs), emergency (modified to accommodate crisis) and non-standard law-making (violating formal rules and the RQPs). In the transition from a crisis to a post-crisis context, the deployment of both emergency and non-standard law-making has become relatively permanent without proper justification having been provided. This reinforces the notion that RQPs and governance legitimacy became less important for the executive than in the pre-crisis period and emergency and non-standard regulatory law-making became institutionalised as new norms of swift law-making. All of these factors prevent stakeholders from being informed and from engaging in deliberation, which jeopardises the legitimacy of post-crisis law-making governance.

In December 2019, the world woke up to the news of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Since then, governments across the globe have deployed various measures to contain the spread of the disease. The government of Ghana, among other measures, issued the Establishment of Emergency Communications System Instrument, 2020 (EI 63) to establish an emergency communications system to aid contact tracing during public health emergencies. This executive instrument has been criticized for illegally “legalizing” the breach of the privacy rights of electronic communications network subscribers in Ghana. This article critically analyses EI 63 in relation to the right to privacy of communication enshrined in Ghana's 1992 Constitution. It argues against the constitutionality of EI 63, calls for its revocation and replacement with an act of Parliament enacted with due regard for Ghana's legislative framework on the protection of the right to privacy of communication.