User:Auden Mays/sandbox

The law of emergency powers is the law governing the circumstances and duration of states of emergency, and the nature and scope of the derogation from constitutional or other legal obligations.

Colonialism
Reports of Fenian violence published in the British press during the 19th century stereotyped Irish revolutionaries as amoral "worse than savage manslayers". Literary works promoted counterinsurgency propaganda. Our Radicals (1886) portrayed Fenians as a terrorist network that uses the technological privileges of Victorian modernity against the British imperial power.

Israel
Israel has been under a state of emergency since the partition of Mandatory Palestine in 1948. Some of the emergency laws apply in the territory of Israel proper (behind the Green Line), others in the Occupied Territories. From a legal standpoint this encompasses all territory under Israeli sovereignty.

Scholars have identified three main subtypes of emergency powers in Israeli law: mandatory emergency defense regulations, administrative emergency orders and formal emergency laws.

These emergency laws overlap, sometimes creating incoherence in the law, allowing the Israeli government to choose the law to apply, often for purposes other than Israel's security needs, while continuing to claim the legitimacy of rule of law. Ruth Gavison wrote in 1985:

"Israel clearly needs some security and emergency legislation, but such legislation should be consistent with universally accepted constitutional standards. Israel should stop hiding behind the very Mandatory regulations that were bitterly attacked by the Yishuv as inconsistent with democracy."

United States
Emergency powers in the United States give the executive branch extraordinary powers threaten the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government.

For many decades the Senate attitude towards the CIA was "We don't watch the dog. We don't know what's going on, and furthermore, we don't want to know." The Church committee was a Congressional investigation to investigate intelligence abuses occurring under the expansion of executive power.

Martial law
When Blackstone wrote about martial law in 1809 he said it was "a temporary excrescence bred out of the distemper of the state". The power to declare martial law was later defended by Dicey as "the common law right of the Crown and its servants to repel force by force in the case of invasion, insurrection, riot or generally of any violence resistance to the law."

State secrets
The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan for complicity in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program because Jeppesen would not be able to defend itself against the allegations without revealing state secrets about "how the United States government does or does not conduct covert operations"

Scholarship
Studies on the law of emergency powers diverge into two main viewpoints, either aiming to justify the authoritarianism of the emergency legal regime, or the right to overthrow a regime that imposes such measures. Some scholars are critical of the implication that liberty and security present a dichotomy wherein security can only be improved at the cost of liberty. Others assume that special powers are an effective way of reducing security risks, posing the question: "How to balance security and liberty?". Those scholars who remain skeptical scrutinize the agendas that drive wars.

Jacques Derrida wrote "the arbitrary suspension or rupture of right, runs the risk of making the sovereign look like the most brutal beast who respects nothing, scorns the law, immediately situates himself above the law, at a distance from the law."

Recent scholarship has revived the work of Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. His doctrine of "state of exception" claimed that urgency justified:
 * 1) Special executive powers
 * 2) Suspension of the Rule of Law
 * 3) Derogation of legal and constitutional rights