Keeping the Enemy at Bay: Emergency, Entropy, Time, and the Law

The paper deals with the relationship between law and emergency, under the light of the concept of entropy and its links with time. The first paragraph identifies the perception of time running faster as the central issue in some legal definitions of “emergency”. Following the teachings of physics, which link the human feeling of time to increases in entropy, the paper argues that laws of emergencies aim at keeping the entropy of the system low, as long as emergency lasts. Taking internment of JapaneseAmericans after Pearl Harbor, and its reflexes on the 2018 Supreme Court’s decision upholding President Trump’s “travel ban” as a case study, the paper critically examines the idea of laws of emergencies (and emergency laws) as inherently transitory. According to the paper, the law cannot escape the increase in entropy of the world, and the law after emergency shall become more entropic than it was before. At the same time, the paper criticizes the theory of the state of exception, and holds that changes in law are not the outcome of the mere decision of an alleged monopolist of the power to determine the state of exception, but of a complex interaction of factual issues, including cultural developments