The 9/11 attacks triggered a new practice of and renewed interest in emergency powers. Without doubt, the United States were at the forefront of the enhanced exercise of such powers: not only did the Patriot Act of 2001 soon come to epitomize the frame if not the substance of governments’ response to the terrorist threat, it also immediately redefined the demarcating line between norm and exception. Vice-president Cheney’s words at the time left no ambiguity: “Homeland security is not a temporary measure just to meet one crisis. Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life […]. I think of it as the new normalcy”. Since then, the US response to terrorism has come to be seen as having led to a new era of ‘permanent global state[s] of emergency’ (Scheppele, p. 354), This has indeed transformed not only the texture of domestic law and policy in numerous countries but indeed, of international law (Vedaschi & Scheppele). In their 2004 study of the features of governments’ responses to situations of crisis, John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino even identified the global increased reliance on emergency powers as a “new model” of government (2004, p. 210, p. 216).