This book contains the first English translations of Santi Romano-s important essays, -On the Decree Laws and the State of Siege During the Earthquakes in Messina and Reggio Calabria- (1909) and -The Modern State and its Crisis- (1910).
Before Santi Romano wrote his masterpiece The Legal Order in 1917-18, he lay the foundations for his ground-breaking theory of law in these two essays, which are still central to scholarly debates about his legacy. The main focus of -On the Decree Laws- is the concept of necessity as a source of law. Such a controversial view anticipated the much more renowned conception of the state of exception advanced later by Carl Schmitt in hisPolitical Theology and has provided a reference point for Giorgio Agamben. The second essay, -The Modern State and its Crisis-, is concerned with the emergence of social forces that the early 20th-century administrative state was struggling to tame. Pursuing an insight that he would develo
