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40 Ga. L. Rev. 835 (2005-2006)
Small Emergencies

handle is hein.journals/geolr40 and id is 855 raw text is: SMALL EMERGENCIES Kim Lane Scheppele* There was an old joke in the Soviet Union: What is the most constant element of the Soviet system? The answer? Temporary problems.' The Soviet Union was fond of thinking of itself as a socialist panacea, but daily life never lived up to the advanced billing. The solution of the Soviet government was to hold the ideal out into the future and attribute the overwhelming problems with which the average person had to cope in actually existing socialist times to temporary problems that ever-increasing socialism would fix. One day, the government assured its citizenry, the problems would be gone. In response to the fine article by Sanford Levinson on Constitutional Norms in a State of Permanent Emergency,2 I want to adapt this joke to diagnose the relation between constitutional dreams and constitutional reality in the United States. What is the most constant element of American constitutionalism? we might ask. The answer, I suggest, is small emergencies. What do I mean by small emergencies? Small emergencies are problems that are deemed worthy of exceptional solutions, but are simultaneously deemed too minor to warrant a full-fledged reassessment of constitutional structures and constitutional aspirations. The very idea that emergencies could be minor-like the very idea that problems are temporary-suggests that they are * Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, and Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Faculty Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Law School. I would like to thank Sandy Levinson for many helpful conversations about these ideas and Serguei Oushakine, who refuses to accept a permanent emergency in daily life. My section on the history of emergency regulation in the United States appears in a different context and more detailed form in Kim Lane Scheppele, North American Emergencies, 4 INTL J. CONST. L. (I-CON) 213 (forthcoming 2006). ' Alexei Yurchak, The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and the Anekdot, 9 PUB. CULTURE 161, 179 (1997). 2 Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Norms in a State of Permanent Emergency, 40 GA. L. REV. 699 (2006). 835

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