The Resilience of Law: A Measure to Tackle the Ineffectiveness of Law

Abstract

This article proposes a new idea about the so-called “resilience of laws,” designed to protect the effectiveness of laws against any change, whether social, legal, political, economic, or otherwise. Laws may initially be effective but become ineffective afterwards, to the detriment of society, given the shock produced by those changes. As a result, the article imposes new expectations on legislators and judges, who should provide society with both effective and resilient laws. The resilience of laws comprises two features: i) static resilience, i.e., the ability of the law to resist the shock caused by a previous change, and ii) dynamic resilience, i.e., the capacity to recover the effectiveness of law once it has been shocked and to prevent a future scenario of ineffectiveness. The article explains how legislators and judges must consider previous challenging changes and shocks to prevent ineffectiveness in the future; this is aimed at having resistant laws against changes.

Keywords

• Resilience of law
• effectiveness of law
• lawmakers
• constitutional aspirations
• judicial and legislative expectations