Feb. 8, 2023

Publications

📝Instaurer l'insécurité juridique comme principe, outil de prévention des crises systémiques catastrophiques totales, in 🕴️G. Gerqueira, 🕴️H. Fulchiron & 🕴️N. Nord (eds.), 📗"Insécurité juridique" : l'émergence d'une notion ?

by Marie-Anne Frison-Roche

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 Full ReferenceM.-A. Frison-Roche, "Instaurer l'insécurité juridique comme principe, outil de prévention des crises systémiques catastrophiques totales" ("Establishing legal uncertainty as a principle and a tool for preventing total catastrophic systemic crises"), in G. Gerqueira, H. Fulchiron et N. Nord (eds.), Insécurité juridique : l'émergence d'une notion ?, Société de législation comparée, coll. "Colloques", vol. 53, 2023, pp. 153-167. 

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📝read the article (in French)

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🚧read the bilingual Working Papier which is the basis of the conference and this article

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🎤watch the conference of March 22, 2021 that took place in the Cour de cassation (French Court de cassation) and for which this reflection was globally led

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 English Summary of the article: "whatever it takes". In 2015, Mario Draghi used this formula to aim for the defence of the European currency, when the Euro was in danger of collapsing under the dance of the speculators who would be enriched by its collapse. Rarely has a formula been more violently political and more strongly prescriptive. It contributed to his being dubbed "Super Mario", as in the video game. The formula was used again in 2020 by the Président de la République Française (President of the French Republic) in the face of the financial turmoil caused by the health crisis that led to similar calculations. It goes beyond the mere "financial cost". With this formula, the President of the European Central Bank stated that the economic crisis in Europe was such that the institution would do everything in its power to put an end to it, without any limits; that all those who, by their behaviour, even supported by their legal prerogatives, in this case the speculators, because they were destroying the economic and financial system, would come up against this and would themselves be swept away by the Central Bank because the latter's mission, in that it is absolutely to safeguard the Euro itself, would prevail "quoi qu'il en coûte" ("whatever the cost"). At one point, the master stood up. If the royal position is the seated position, when he listens and judges, it is by rising that he shows his acceptance of also being the master, because he is in charge of more and will use everything to win.

More broadly, we might consider drawing up a positive concept of legal uncertainty (which is bound to please the Hegelians), increasing legal certainty: this would make it possible to associate a clearer legal regime with the hypotheses of legal uncertainty. Indeed, rather than sweeping Law under the carpet, which explains many of the tensions between the Conseil constitutionnel (French Constitutional Council) and the Conseil d'État (Council of State) on the one hand, and the legislator and the government on the other, concerning the "État d'urgence" ("State of emergency"), we could set out the conditions in which legal uncertainty makes it possible to set aside or limit rules.

The idea proposed is therefore that in "extraordinary situations", legal uncertainty would be a dimension, or even a principle which would be admissible. And developing this first point, it is proposed that the hypothesis of an "economic crisis" justifies a dimension, or even a principle of "legal uncertainty". But this first assertion needs to be tested. Is an economic crisis, a concept that needs to be defined, if it is to have such a major reversal effect, such an extraordinary 'situation'? Furthermore, to deal with this extraordinary situation constituted by an 'economic crisis', how much legal uncertainty would be legally acceptable, or even legally claimed? Could we even conceive of a reversal of principle that would bring applicable Law to an economic crisis under the aegis of legal uncertainty? In such a case, the question that then arises is to determine the conditions and criteria for emerging from the economic crisis, or even to determine the elements of perspective of an economic crisis, which could justify in advance the admission of an injection of legal uncertainty. Above all, Law has control over the future.

The economic crisis should therefore be legally defined as an exceptional situation, before stressing that Regulation and Compliance Law, because on the one hand we move from crisis to crisis and on the other hand the whole system aims to avoid and manage the future crisis in advance or to exclude it; this is particularly true of health and climate issues (the way the health crisis was managed was to 'decree' that the State should initiate an economic crisis), which means that legal insecurity is no longer seen as a distant exception, a failure to be combated, but as a lever that can be used to influence the future.

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