Means of Law : The Dialectic of the State of Emergency and Human Rights

Means of Law rethinks the dialectical relationship between the state of emergency and human rights.

Challenging the widespread assumption that emergency powers and rights stand in simple opposition, Jonas Heller argues that they are structurally and functionally complementary. At the heart of this complementarity lies the modern concept of the legal person. Modern law liberates individuals from the forms of traditional rule only at the cost of new forms of domination, since the legal person who is the subject of human rights is also the means by which the state can exercise political agency.

Through sustained engagement Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, the book reconstructs the juridical form of modern law as a dialectic between entitlement and disenfranchisement. Human rights appear not only as normative limits on state power but also as legal means through which individuals are constituted, addressed, and regulated as a population. Likewise, the state of exception is shown not merely as a suspension of law, but as an intensified form of state action that draws on the same juridical structures that underwrite rights. In both cases, the legal person functions ambivalently: as the bearer of inalienable claims and as a medium of governmental power.

Heller applies this discussion to states of emergency in the contemporary legal and political landscape via the two case studies of Turkey and France. The book draws on Hannah Arendt’s critique of human rights as abstracting the human subject from the political capacities that inscribe it within a community. Finally, Means of Law develops an alternative proposal for understanding the link between the state of emergency and human rights via Franz Neumann’s critique of the concept of the legal person, returning to the question of sovereignty as that which allows the state to act upon the people by means of law.