Crown Jurist Recalibrated: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Perennial Issues of Legal Oversight in Finland

Crises are often associated with institutional change, but they also provide opportunities for subtle institutional recalibration. This article analyses how the COVID-19 crisis challenged legal overseers in Finland. We focus particularly on the Chancellor of Justice, a central institution of legal oversight residing alongside the Parliamentary Ombudsman. We show how the Chancellor’s position in the intra-institutional setting and historical conceptualisations of the two institutions influenced the Chancellor’s COVID-19-era activities as a legal expert. Amid the pandemic, the Chancellor was criticised for becoming a potentially politicized "crown jurist" due to its close association and collaboration with the government. Far from being a historical novelty, we argue, this in fact shows recurring patterns in the Chancellor’s institutional history, which owe to its intra-institutional position as an independent actor residing with the executive powers as well as to historically accumulated conceptions concerning the institution. Policy actors refer to past conceptualisations in seeking to address current and future challenges of the institution – sometimes critically but often also to defend it. Institutional history thereby emerges as a crucial category of continuity and change that also allows for expedient recalibration of administrative institutions amid external and internal challenges.