E-Books
On 2 March 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was identified in Portugal. On March 18, 2020, for the first time in a democracy, a state of emergency was declared in Portugal. On 27 April 2020 the first communication of the Conference Cycle (webinar version) COVID-19 and the Law took place, under the aegis of the Law and Political Science Faculty of the Universidade Lusófona do Porto (FDCP-ULP). The simple enunciation of this succession of dates is enough to immediately understand that the FDCP-ULP knew how to respond to the challenge – also legal – posed by this pandemic, organising the discussion, with interlocutors from the Faculty and other Faculties, from the North to the South of the country, on the main problems posed to Law by COVID-19, less than two months after the first case was known in Portugal. The Faculty owes the dynamisation of the Cycle of Conferences to Master Miguel Osório de Castro who, faced with this new reality, immediately volunteered to become the driving force of this Cycle. In this context, we were able to count on the immediate availability of many colleagues to participate, specialists in the various areas of Law that were – and still are – affected by the proliferation of legal rules that arose in a pandemic context. Given the diversity and richness of the contributions, we believe that the memory of that Cycle of Conferences should be registered, reason for which the present work follows the order in which the communications took place. Themes covered include private and public contracts, commercial companies, competition, criminal problems, procedural deadlines and even artificial intelligence.