Chaos and Rules: Should Responses to Violent Crises Always Be Constitutional?

Hamilton also commented on the Roman dictatorship: Every man the least conversant in Roman history knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.powers to "nonemergency" powers); 2 AMNON RUBINSTErN, HA-MISHPAT HA-KONSTITUTSYONI SHEL MEDINAT ISRAEL 801-25 (5th rev.ed.1996).10. See infra Section IV.A. 11.Frederick Schauer, Exceptions, 58 U. CHI.L. REV.871, 872 (1991).Schauer suggests that the notion of the exception deserves to be treated as a discrete jurisprudential phenomenon.He suggests that a study of the exception reveals important insights about the linkage of law and a "background social landscape" by which he refers particularly to the language a society uses and the categories it deploys to carve up the world.Id.As I will seek to show below, discussion of the phenomenon of emergency-as-exception can similarly tell us a great deal about that linkage.12. 317 U. S. 1 (1942).13