Legal time lives in the shadow of constitutional law. By enacting rules that are supposed to last, constitutional law adopts and enforces a certain timespan. It advances the idea that it is possible to halt the passing of time by fixing rules that will last, even at another time. For a constitutional regime to endure, legislatures, executives, and courts operate – sometimes harmoniously, other times less – to deliver tasks conceived, organized, and understood around this time. Constitutional law therefore accumulates time, but only in one direction, to the enforcement and expansion of what has been once acquired (or more simply declared). The idea of respect for the constitution relies on the idea of time too, of something of the past becoming dear through time and because of time.
By gathering experts from different fields and approaches this workshop, organised by Maastricht University, aims to explore the boundaries of constitutional time, which time-frames are relevant for constitutional law, and to address the legal strategies and techniques to make temporal constitutional law possible. The purpose of the workshop is to make concrete proposals for ensuring consistency between constitutional law and time and to address the potential and critics of legal devices elaborated for this purpose. It will also examine the timeframe adopted in different domains of law, to assess similarities, differences, and peculiarities of the legal time therein.