ABSTRACT
Natural disasters, pandemics, industrial accidents, terrorist attacks and economic shocks are examples of emergencies that seriously affect populations and the ordinary functioning of legal orders. Resilience is the paradigm advanced to guide societies in their effort to mitigate, be prepared for, respond to and recover from disasters. As law will be deployed in disaster mitigation or implicated in its failure, it has to be analysed how law and resilience interact. For a number of disciplines, resilience represents a challenge in itself, as its goals, scope, and tools need to be clarified. From a legal standpoint, resilience amounts to an under-determined concept outside the domain of law whose implementation may produce legal effects. Law guides policy-making by vetting the means used to achieve policy goals against rule of law values and by checking the substantive consistency of policies pursued with constitutional values. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
