Emergency Power And Two-tiered Legality (2013)

Commentators have long debated how to think about the relationship between law and presidential power during emergencies. Three distinct positions have emerged in that debate. First is the strict approach: that the president is subject to the normal constitutional and statutory laws even during emergencies. Second is the accommodation approach: that constitutional and statutory law should be interpreted to allow for more expansive presidential power during time of emergency. Third is the extralegal approach: that exercises of emergency authority should be understood as operating outside the law, potentially with some sort of after-the-fact evaluation of whether the exercise was functionally or morally justified1.\nEach of these approaches has potential drawbacks. The strict approach’s denial that the interpretation of constitutional and statutory authority changes during times of emergency seems naïve and threatens to make the law either too restrictive or too disconnected from actual practice. The accommodation approach, by allowing governmental authority to expand during time of perceived emergency, may allow the government to opportunistically ratchet up its power and may create precedent that could distort the law during more normal times. The extralegal approach, by placing exercises of emergency authority outside the law, may leave these actions unregulated and undermine the rule of law, and it may be unrealistic if it depends on an acknowledgment by public officials of illegality.\nIn his thoughtful essay, Richard Fallon has added to this debate by suggesting an approach that attempts to keep emergency power within the domain of law while reducing the danger that exercises of this power will corrupt the rest of the law.2Analogizing from “threshold deontology” in moral theory, Fallon suggests a distinction between the rules of constitutional and statutory interpretation that apply during normal times and those that apply during emergencies. Citing Justice Holmes’s observation that “[g]reat cases . . . make bad law,” 3 Fallon’s chief concern is the “problem of normalization: powers created for emergencies spill over their originally intended banks and become the norm.”4 His approach, he suggests, addresses this concern while retaining the rule of law. It also “fits our historical and contemporary practices for gauging the scope of executive authority.”5 \nAt first glance, Fallon’s approach may seem to be a restatement of the accommodation approach. After all, his claim that “[w]hen consequence-based imperatives possess sufficient urgency, it is right to conclude, as a matter of law, that the president can do some things that would be flatly illegal or unconstitutional under the ordinarily applicable rules,” 6 is precisely the claim made by accommodationists. But Fallon’s position is potentially distinguishable in two respects. First, Fallon hypothesizes a two-tiered model that involves both normal law, akin to what is envisioned by the strict approach, as well as a category of emergency law, with the latter limited to “highly exigent cases.”7 Second, Fallon suggests that presidential actions that can be legally justified only in the emergency category “should be regarded as lesser legal evils that are regrettably in breach of,” and not wholly reconcilable with, “ordinary legal and constitutional ideals that emergency does not eradicate.”8 By having the emergency category conceptualized as narrow and as tainted, the hope is that it will be sufficiently cabined to avoid corrupting the rest of the law.\nFallon’s analogy to threshold deontology is useful in highlighting some of the dilemmas that emergency power can pose for the law. Nevertheless, I have doubts about the need for, or usefulness of, two-tiered legality. As an initial matter, it is not clear that the idea of a regrettable lesser evil has broad relevance to real-world issues of statutory and constitutional law relating to presidential power. In addition, I question whether Fallon’s central concern—that the accommodation approach will lead to the creation of precedent that will corrupt the rest of the law—is borne out by practice. Nevertheless, I understand Fallon’s anxiety about the danger that the executive branch might extend its authority by tendentiously relying on past practices. This anxiety, I would suggest, relates to the general role of historical practice in informing presidential authority rather than anything specific to the emergency power context, and I therefore question whether a two-tiered legality approach would do much to address it.