This introductory article outlines three fundamental regulatory developments in the EU’s legislation addressing digitalization and automation of decision-making: One is that across many acts we see a move towards more complex multi-level composite procedures, involving not only public structures with agencies, EU bodies, national agencies, but also co-regulation through standardisation in combination with – in several areas – audited self-regulation. A second feature of much of the current legislation in digital matters is that obligations imposed therein require an increased attention to information management – from sourcing to use, dissemination, sharing. This is a requirement for both public and private actors imposing ever more ‘granular’ knowledge and reporting of information flows in economic operators. A third is the growing role of interoperability which is being firmly established as a tool to create data exchange possibilities The diverse regulatory tools and methods are creating complex networks of legal relations and obligations which appear difficult to submit to oversight and compliance without strong protection of individual rights and procedural structures ensuring their enforcement.

The Covid-19 crisis provided an opportunity for the European Union to offer an alternative regulatory response to the crisis of values by systemically linking European funding to respect for the rule of law. A rule of law conditionality mechanism for spending was introduced in the Recovery and Resilience Facility and in Regulation 2020/2092. It is both positive – in that it encourages Member States to implement reforms and investments aimed at improving the rule of law – and negative – in that it takes the form of financial sanctions. However, the development of the rule of law conditionality is leading to an economisation of the concept of the rule of law, insofar as it mainly concerns those dimensions of the rule of law that are conducive to growth – such as justice systems and the fight against corruption. As a result, it could paradoxically exacerbate the very crisis it is designed to resolve.

One of the goals of this paper is to define the most important concepts for the comparative study of the constitutional risk management of the V4 countries. For this purpose, first, it considers the theoretical difficulties of conceptualising emergencies, especially focussing on what kind of response can be given to the widespread view that considers emergencies as a kind of legal “black hole” due to their unpredictability. Then a general definition of “emergency” is discussed which is broad and flexible enough to serve as a basis not only for a comparative study but also for the constitutional discourse of emergencies. Constitutional crisis management as a core concept for such an undertaking is also canvassed. After defining the basic concepts essential for evaluation and comparison, the article outlines the general types of emergency regulatory regimes. The development of effective regulatory systems for emergencies also has to face certain problems that every constitutional polity must solve. Finally, the paper summarises assessment criteria necessary for the evaluation and a comparison of the emergency constitutions of different countries.

This article examines the regulatory landscape of financial data access within the European Union, emphasising the implications and effectiveness of recent legislative initiatives. It provides an in-depth analysis of the Financial Data Access Regulation (FIDA) proposal and its relationship with existing laws, focusing on the possibilities for data access and utilisation in the context of Open Finance. The discussion evaluates the regulatory framework for automated decision-making (ADM) in European financial law, highlighting its strengths and identifying areas for improvement. By exploring the intersections of tech resilience, financial regulation, and data protection, the article aims to clarify the practical implications of current and proposed rules, emphasising effective practices and areas needing further legislative attention.

European constitutions differ greatly in the depth to which they deal with emergencies: while many constitutions devote more or less detailed regulation to emergency regimes, others almost completely neglect these issues or dedicate only some very short and vague references to emergency situations and powers. This article aims to carry out a systematic comparison of the emergency-related provisions of forty European constitutions, focusing on (1) the level of detail of the regulation, (2) the emergency regimes addressed, and (3) the restrictions on fundamental rights. As the study points out, only two out of the forty constitutions are completely silent on emergency powers. However, the remaining thirty-eight constitutions show wide variation in the level of detail of the emergency regulation; the vast majority of the emergency regimes are related to war or armed attack (or the danger thereof), to internal crises threatening the constitutional order, and to natural disasters. Concerning fundamental rights, the examination of the constitutional texts confirms that twenty-five out of the forty constitutions encompass some provisions on the restriction of these rights in a state of emergency.

This contribution analyses the EU’s new data acts. Interoperability is a common denominator of the EU’s new data acts. This paper demonstrates that the new data acts provide various approaches or concepts of collaborative governance to regulate interoperability. Although the EU’s new data acts are far from a uniform governance concept, we detected certain institutional arrangements organising the collaboration between private self-regulatory bodies, other private stakeholders and public bodies to lay down rules for interoperability.

Following the contemporary debate surrounding two alternative perspectives on compliance – enforcement and management – this article suggests an analysis through the lens of the rule of law crisis. Specifically, the financial and techno-managerial strategy developed by the EU for the indirect protection of the rule of law relies on mechanisms that combine characteristics from both the enforcement and management approaches. This article will identify these mechanisms, namely the European Semester, the Conditionality regulation, the European Structural Investment Funds and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, in order to determine their nature, features, and tools for ensuring compliance with the rule of law. The hypothesis of this article relies on the idea that the EU’s tools are characterised by a mismatch between the causes of the identified problems and the chosen solutions. Considering that the deployment of the above measures has not re-established compliance, the EU strategy toes between inducing rule conformity on the one hand and deterring rule of law violations on the other. However, it seems that only the former can restore the rule of law, as the latter is considered ill-equipped to reverse or at least halt instances of backsliding. This mismatch explains why the Justice Scoreboard, the Framework, and the Review Cycle with its Annual Report have not made any difference, and more generally, why management strategies are unfit for dealing with deliberate backsliding.1

This paper explores the necessary adaptations to the theory of administrative discretion when using AI systems. Regulatory frameworks in the EU, US, and Spain do not prohibit the application of AI in discretionary decision-making. Particularly, AI systems can be used when discretionary power involves correlations. However, to meet Rule of Law conditions, it is essential to establish adaptations and boundaries in areas such as duty of care, reason-giving, and judicial review. These conditions should focus on the impact of decisions on the affected individuals.

The paper outlines Czech constitutional law and the development of emergency law. Initially, the legislature did not expect emergencies to occur, perhaps due to the idealistic optimism associated with the general atmosphere of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the “End of History” thesis. As a result, emergencies were not regulated by Czech law in the 1990s. This changed after the great floods at the end of the 1990s, when “history returned,” and the need for some special rules for emergencies became clear. The first decades of this century showed that Czech emergency law worked well for short-term natural disasters. The game-changer came in 2020, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for a long-term state of emergency. It soon became clear that the rules that worked for floods and other disasters did not work for long-term global pandemics. In other words, the legal system was not prepared for a situation in which emergencies were the rule rather than the exception. Legislators were unable to prepare a long-term legislative response to fill this gap. The memory of COVID-19 is fading fast, and there are no plans to reform the relevant legislation. Accordingly, any new pandemic or similar event will lead to the same problems that the Czech legal system had to deal with from 2020 to 2022.

The European Semester is an economic governance tool that the European Union (EU) uses to monitor and coordinate national policies, but it has also evolved into a mechanism to address rule-of-law risks in Member States. By linking financial support to reforms, particularly through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the Semester helps enforce rule-of-law standards and represents an innovative approach to safeguarding EU values. However, this process raises concerns about democratic accountability, and it overlooks broader societal concerns.

The Recovery and Resilience Facility reflects the generalisation of spending conditionality and the economisation of the rule of law in EU governance. The RRF performance-based approach also applies to measures related to rule of law protection, meaning that recovery funds can only be disbursed as long as the related conditions are met. While the academic literature has already highlighted the difficulty of applying performance frameworks to values, this article assesses how the RRF performance-based approach integrates the safeguard of the rule of law, based on a comparative study of the Slovak, Hungarian and Polish plans. Rule of law protection is set as a priority in the RRF. Yet, the economic and financial framing – in line with New Public Management and neoliberal governmentality – limits the potential impact of rule of law reforms. Overall, the effectiveness of rule-of-law spending conditionality depends more on the features of the performance regime and the attitude of political actors than the degree of financial pressure.

Understanding the interactions between law, technology and society writ large is a very important task for legal analysis. However, the relationship between these areas can be very complex, resulting in a complex web of interactions and feedbacks. Fortunately, Science and Technology Studies (‘STS’) offers a varied toolkit which can help us to understand how these fields overlap.

In this article, I first providing a brief primer regarding STS and its core ideas. The article then considers some high-level legal discussions (particularly those relating to the concept of technology neutral law, and of Lawrence Lessig’s four modalities of regulation) and considers how STS may help to compliment or expand upon those debates. The article then examines how STS may assist with some current legal discussions, focusing on issues that arise from certain types of automated decision-making, as governed by the GDPR, Article 22. Finally, I provide some starting points for those wishing to incorporate STS into their own work, including some of STS’s limitations for law. I conclude that STS can be a very powerful tool for legal scholars, which can help to reinforce existing approaches and to produce analyses which reflect a fuller range of legal, technical and social nuances.

The paper offers a comprehensive overview of Hungary’s emergency law and its misuse over the four years since its introduction in March 2020. Hungary serves as a clear example of how a “state of danger” – initially intended as an exceptional legal measure – can become normalised through repeated declarations. The populist government’s continuous use of emergency powers has led to unchecked lawmaking and the manipulation of legal frameworks to advance populist agendas. The article argues that while Hungary’s detailed emergency provisions in the Fundamental Law were intended to serve as a form of constitutional risk management, after four years of living in a permanent “state of danger”, the scholarly debate has shifted to whether this very risk management has itself become the risk. According to emergency law theory, managing constitutional risks is equally vital in the emergency legal order. Yet in Hungary, both the black letter of the law and the constitutional practices observed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic – along with the Ninth Amendment to the Fundamental Law, which introduced a new emergency regime in 2021 – reveal that constitutional risk management has ultimately failed. This is manifest in the erosion of the separation of powers, the weakening of judicial review, and the shrinking of human rights protections. The article substantiates its argument by examining the related constitutional framework and constitutional practice in Hungary between 2020 and 2024.

This paper examines the impact that the finally approved Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) will have on European public authorities when developing, acquiring and using AI systems. It argues that, despite the initial disappointment that the Act may cause when approaching it from an administrative law perspective, and despite the fact that some of the solutions that have been finally chosen are questionable, it represents a remarkable step forward, duly addressing many of the problems raised in the literature in relation to the automation of administrative decisions and the use of AI systems by public authorities.

Over the last fifteen years, the European Union has built up its regulatory response to the rule of law crisis. That framework seeks to address rule of law-related undesirable events depending on whether or not they have already occurred. As risk prevention has a limited role in the EU’s rule of law policy, undesirable events are mostly dealt with in the context of crisis management. Evaluation, reaction and conditionality mechanisms are all affected by issues relating to operability and legitimacy which reduce their overall performance. The resulting moderate efficiency of crisis management tools may still be improved by making use of the upgraded rule of law mechanisms in a systemic way.

This article analyses the constitutional framework regulating states of emergency in Poland and addresses key issues related to their interpretation and implementation. The first part discusses the conditions for declaring martial law, a state of an extraordinary situation, and a state of natural disaster, as well as the specific rules for the operation of public authorities in such emergencies. The next part analyses the practice, revealing the consistent reluctance of Polish authorities to invoke states of emergency, even in circumstances that seem to justify such measures. Consequently, a state of emergency under the 1997 Constitution was declared in Poland only once – in 2021, in response to a migration crisis on the border with Belarus. No constitutional emergency was declared during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the introduction of far-reaching restrictions on individual rights and freedoms. The article argues that state authorities can abuse emergency regulations, either through their unjustified application or by deliberately circumventing them.

This article contributes to understanding how inexperience and lack of commitment to evidence-based decision making may undermine an otherwise broadly functional framework for constitutional risk management. As part of a focus on the “Visegrád Four” countries, it also helps understand regional dynamics since the COVID-19 pandemic as the most visible emergency after 1989. The article starts with a brief elucidation of the political contexts that have shaped Slovakia’s constitutional risk management, focusing on the developments from 2020 through early 2025. An analysis of mechanisms of emergency risk management in the constitutional framework follows, that helps identify key state authorities attempting to make decisions under serious time pressures. The implementation of the constitutional framework during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the creation of new avenues for restricting rights and bolstering executive competence, with the formally powerful constitutional review mechanisms struggling to challenge these decisions. Ultimately, political context emerges as key: Slovakia entered the COVID-19 pandemic with a governing coalition enjoying constitutional majority and an aura of reform and hope. The emergency mismanagement not only facilitated the breakup of this coalition and early elections, but also a rise in emergency conspiracies openly hostile to institutions and actors committed to evidence-based decision making.

Since limiting judicial independence in Hungary and Poland, the politics of the rule of law crisis have been examined by various scholars discussing conflicts within and between EU and domestic institutions. The rule of law is no longer a purely national affair – it is of high political salience both for the Member States and the EU polity. The question addressed here is: how has the rule of law crisis reshaped the EU’s modes of governance? We argue that to safeguard this common value, the EU is evolving into a regulatory polity (3.0). This development marks a shift from Majone’s EU regulatory state’s focus on regulating markets (1.0) and regulation in core state powers in times of crises (2.0) to regulation on the core values of the polity (3.0). The article shows that in a context of growing dissensus over the rule of law, EU institutional actors have sought to strengthen “rulemaking,” “rule monitoring” and “rule enforcement” through a regulatory approach anchored in a market logic. It also shows that shifting from the traditional regulatory state 1.0 to regulation in core state powers 2.0, the regulatory polity 3.0 strengthens the EU’s institutional capacity to act when the rule of law is under strain through depoliticised “rule monitoring” and politicised “rulemaking“ and “rule enforcement“ as illustrated in the cases of Hungary and Poland discussed in this article.