Institute for the Study of States of Exception - Under Exception, Issue 04, December 8, 2025
UNDER EXCEPTION
It’s closer than you think.
ISSUE 04
December 10, 2025
Dear Readers,
This issue highlights how the logic of emergency continues to move into mainstream political life. The Blood Work podcast revisits Carl Schmitt’s influence on debates about sovereignty and exceptional powers, while new academic work examines COVID-era biopolitics and reevaluates Agamben’s Homo Sacer framework. Brandon Johnson’s analysis in the Yale Journal of Regulation further warns that the growing use of emergency declarations in U.S. domestic policy risks blurring the line between crisis response and routine governance, and several other pieces provide real world debates and examples.
Ed Bogan
Founder, Institute for the Study of States of Exception
ISSE ANNOUNCEMENTS
Upcoming Office Hours: During our next Office Hours session at 1:00 PM EST on Thursday, December 18, ISSE Founder Ed Bogan will lead a discussion on all the latest events relevant to our focus.
If you are interested in joining, please send a note to officehours@statesofexception.org and we will add you to the list and send you a calendar invite. If you have suggestions for topics you want to discuss at future office hours, please add those to your note as well.
GLOBAL EVENTS
ISSE comments on Former JAGs Working Group statement on September 2, 2025 lethal strikes. On November 29, the Former JAGs Working Group released a statement arguing that if a reported second U.S. strike on two survivors of a September 2 attack on a civilian boat allegedly carrying narcotics occurred as described, both the order and its execution would constitute a war crime or murder. The statement frames the incident as a warning about how expanding emergency powers, weakened legal oversight, and aggressive threat narratives can enable unlawful uses of lethal force.
Executive Emergency Powers and the U.S. Tariff State: Now with the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 28, 2025, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Trump’s use of IEEPA emergency powers to impose sweeping “Liberation Day” and reciprocal tariffs was unlawful, and on August 29, the Federal Circuit affirmed while allowing the tariffs to remain in place pending Supreme Court review, which is underway following oral arguments before them on November 5, 2025. The case tests whether emergency economic authorities can be used to effectively rewrite the U.S. tariff schedule, raising broader questions about separation of powers, nondelegation, and the limits of presidential authority.
Declaration of a crime emergency in the District of Columbia. On August 11, 2025, President Trump declared a crime emergency in Washington, D.C., placed the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, and deployed 2,000 National Guard troops using Section 740 of the Home Rule Act. After a federal district judge ruled the deployment unlawful on November 20, the D.C. Circuit on December 4 granted the administration’s request to halt that order, continuing the ongoing legal fight over presidential authority to federalize local policing and the D.C. National Guard.
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Blood Work podcast - “Crock of Schmitt” (Blood Work Podcast, November 2025). This episode of the Blood Work podcast takes on the work of Carl Schmitt—the Nazi-era jurist whose ideas about sovereignty (“he who decides on the exception”) and the friend–enemy distinction remain central to debates on states of exception. With a frank tone, the hosts unpack how Schmitt’s anti-liberal, authoritarian thought continues to shape contemporary political theory and why understanding his ideas is crucial precisely in order to move away from them.
ACADEMIC LITERATURE
Biopolitics and public health in times of crisis (Garliauskas, July 2025).
Rokas Garliauskas examines how COVID-19-era measures—lockdowns, vaccination campaigns, digital contact tracing, and quarantine protocols—reveal public health policy as a form of political power acting directly on bodies and populations. Through comparative case studies, the article shows how legal frameworks and political cultures shape both emergency responses and the unequal valuation of life, arguing that health crises are as deeply political as they are biomedical.
A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary (Prozorov, 2023). Sergei Prozorov uses Giorgio Agamben’s writings on COVID-19 to reassess the core concepts of Homo Sacer—sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. He argues that Agamben’s attempt to fuse these ideas into a single paradigm of politics is conceptually flawed, and suggests instead a “non-relation” between sovereign power and bare life that better accounts for possibilities of resistance and transformation.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Normalizing Emergencies - Yale Journal of Regulation (Johnson, February 2025). Brandon J. Johnson examines how President Trump’s return to office has been accompanied by a flurry of “national emergency” declarations—from the southern border to energy and cost-of-living measures—that extend emergency framing into ordinary domestic policy. He warns that treating routine governance as a series of emergencies, especially against the backdrop of January 6 being recast and its participants pardoned, risks eroding legal and political constraints on executive power.
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