The Lives and Times of Temporary Legislation and Sunset Clauses

Antonios Kouroutakis’s new book on “sunset clauses”—defined as “statutory provisions providing that a particular law will expire automatically on a particular date unless it is re-authorised by the legislature”1—comes at just the right time. We are in the golden age of the study of temporary legislation. As the sunset movement in American state legislatures began to wane toward the end of the 1980s,2 so did scholarly interest in the field.3 In the last decade or so, however, we see rekindled scholarly interest, manifested by a growing number of articles and books on temporary legislation,4 with Kouroutakis being the third in the last four years to dedicate a full book to the subject.5 Kouroutakis’s book can therefore be seen both as an indication of and a major contribution to a burgeoning global interest in temporary legislation. Kouroutakis makes several important contributions to the field. In addition to offering an in-depth examination of sunset clauses in the United Kingdom (in contrast to existing scholarship’s focus on other jurisdictions6), Kouroutakis provides a missing historical perspective in addition to important normative insights. Nonetheless, as is inevitable in any one book, he leaves open several questions for further research, which I will briefly highlight in each Part to follow.

Legislation · Legislature · Library science · Normative · Political science · Scholarship · State (computer science) · Statutory law · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · History · Law · Legal principles and applications

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