Potere e libertà al tempo delle emergenze

The current health emergency raises many questions about law: from the difficult balance of constitutional values to the never definitively resolved relationship between science and law, from the fallacies of logical decision models to the substantial impracticability of democratic institutions in such serious times of crisis. Not only. In the background there is always the danger that emergency will degenerate into the extra-ordinary voids of a state of exception in which the naked power à la Schmitt decides sovereignly without having any rules behind it. This special issue is divided into two parts. On the one hand it reflects about the pandemic, on the other it focuses on other emergencies that obviously do not disappear with the health one, and which, if anything, risk being forgotten. The separation, however, of these themes does not serve to point out the differences. On the contrary, it looks for points in common. In short, there is no emergency, but emergencies in the plural. Legal provisions on what is ordinary are increasingly replaced by the law of major emergencies, with all the uncertainties that derive from it. In these introductory pages there are some first reflections to frame the many questions in focus.