 Good afternoon, Gulshin and Hans, thank you again for your kind invitation here. It's always a pleasure and an honor to be in this Wimbledon of Libertarians, as Anthony Miller called it. A state of emergency, a state of necessity, a state of exception. This is the topic of my speech today. We just came out or believe to come out of three, more than three years of this sort of rulings. Italy has been, I would say, the country where all these things have been experimented and used in other countries as the so-called western civilized world, which is western okay, but civilized, I would say, not so much anymore, at least. We had an ongoing aggression on basic freedoms, on property rights, with lockdowns of businesses, on liberty rights, with forced quarantine and restrictions to travel. And lastly and finally, on the physical integrity of the people with forced vaccine, I don't know if we could call them vaccine, anyway mandates to get some physical and pharmacological treatment to the happiness of the producers of these products, but not so much for the population. In Italy we came to the hardest version of the emergency rules between October 2021 and March-April 2022, when it was not only compulsory for certain professional categories to have either the test or for most of them the vaccine and to show the COVID certificate, the QR code to get access to their workplaces, to the means of public transportation, to restaurants, bars and so on. It was a nightmare. What has been said about this time is that it was a giant operation of mass hypnosis and I think it worked. There's a very interesting book from Matthias Desmet about the psychology of totalitarianism and it is a very fair analysis of what happened during these years. What's interesting is he says that more or less one third of the population fell for the hypnosis. They are hypnotized and still are because there's no hypnotizer who takes care to wake them up, so they go on in the hypnosis. There is one third of a resistance movement. I have the honor to be one of the leaders in Italy of the resistance movement. We did a lot, and by the way, this did a lot to the libertarian movement because we could gain much interest for libertarian ideas, for libertarian themes, books and so on. I have these surreal conversations in public rallies and places with people asking me which is the best entry book to start reading Hans Hermann Hoppe's ideas and last week they were asking me, 30, 40 people, how can we abolish central banks? You wouldn't ever think that this could be possible, so this gives us a glimmer of hope. But then there is another third, and these are the worst ones I think because the hypnotized, okay, it's not their fault, the other ones are trying to do something against the situation but then there's a good third of the population who don't do anything at all because they go along. In Nazi Germany they were called the Mitleifer, the ones who go together with the mass with what is given to them by propaganda. And the consensus, the general consensus was fueled exactly by fear, first of all fear of being sick, of being ill, of dying, of an invisible enemy, a small tiny virus that you cannot see and fear because they told the people that there were no cures, no medicines against this virus which is a blatant lie and a propaganda which is very similar to war propaganda. The same phrases, the same way of communicating which were used in Italy and in other countries, especially during World War I which was the beginning of this all, were used also during this recent crisis and people fell for it. They were actually convinced that we were at war against something. In reality the war was there but it was the war of the state against its citizens as usual. Randolph Born famously said that war is the health of the state. I could say the state of emergency, the state of necessity is the health of the state because in fact war is just the main application of the state of emergency and it gives to the government, to the executive unheard of powers they can do whatever they want because there is a necessity, something which has to be dealt with immediately. Will we go out of this situation? Will we manage to come out of this situation? I'm not so optimistic because the signs are there that they are starting again. By the way, although the COVID emergency stopped in Italy, we are now under two new emergencies. We have the DROV emergency because they thought there wouldn't be water and rain this summer. After they put this in place we had terrible rains and floodings and so on but still we are in the emergency because there's no water and we are in an ongoing emergency owing to the war in Ukraine so the government can do basically whatever they want as far as military and financial help is concerned to the gang of robbers of Ukraine against the gang of robbers of Russia, so this is the actual situation. All the technological infrastructure that was built and set up during the COVID time is still in place. They could start again in one minute. They can make a decree and say starting from tomorrow you have again to show your QR codes and who is not belonging to the good citizens who did whatever they were asked to do, who cannot use a bus or train or buy food in a supermarket or whatever. Among the voices of opposition and of resistance against this situation there has been an Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who is not a libertarian of course but still is one of the few Italians who maintained the ability to think and to think about what was happening and in fact he is researching all these areas since a long time. His biggest work is called Homo Sacher, so the human being who is consecrated to something, it is a religious expression and it is a long reflection about biopolitics and about the fact that in our modern world the naked human being, the sheer existence and survival is confronted with these enormous organizations, not only states and governments but also over national organizations. He is a professor of philosophy, he taught in Mascherata, in Verona, in Düsseldorf, in Germany. In 2004 he famously renounced a course that he had to held at the New York University because of the entry rules in the United States. At that time they began with fingerprints and biometrics and so on and that is why he refused to go to the United States because he wouldn't submit to these measures. Now we are more or less used to it and in fact his reflection about the state of exception began with the Patriot Act which is still in force and which is the most blatant example of the permanent state of emergency that is still there in the United States and that has been the example for whatever came afterwards. So one of the books which are part of his research entitled Homo Sacher is a book which is entitled State of Necessity, Stato Linnicicità. I think there is no English translation unfortunately but it's a very interesting book, it's a very deep book. In English by the way you should translate State of Exception with Marshal Law which is not exactly the same and the expression is a little bit confusing but often you find it referred to as Marshal Law. The book as I said was written in 2003 and it is a commentary and an expansion on two other books by another jurist and philosopher which is Karl Schmidt. In the 20s he wrote two books about the same topic. One is on dictatorship and the other one is political theology and the most important quote from the second book is this quote Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception. So Karl Schmidt said that at the core of the power of the states there is the decision about the state of exception. In German the expression is a little bit... it's far, you can interpret it in two ways because it's entscheidant über den Ausnahmezustand and über about can mean both if there is a state of exception and can mean also what the content of this state of exception is so what powers have to be given to the government or to the king or whatever. For Karl Schmidt of course this was a good thing because at the end of the day he thought that what politics had to do was to take a decision. So what is necessary in politics is take a decision whatever the decision and the decision is useful to give legitimation to whatever politics decide. As you know Karl Schmidt at least in the first part was in favor of the Nazi regime and the construction of the national socialist regime was exactly done with this position regarding the state of exception. It was the famous article 48 of the Constitution of Weimar which gave the possibility to the president to suspend a certain amount of basic rights and basic guarantees to the citizens. Schmidt of course was among the writers who thought that this enumeration of the rights and guarantees that could be suspended during the state of exception was not compulsory that basically the president could do whatever he wanted to make sure that the power of the state and the existence of the state was granted. In his book on dictatorship Karl Schmidt gives a distinction between two sorts of dictatorships the commissary dictatorship and the sovereign dictatorship. The first the commissary has the aim to maintain the existing state of school so the commissary dictator is one who must preserve what is there and to do this he has the power to suspend all laws and to commit violence basically this is the core of power. The sovereign dictator is the one who is in the course of establishing a new order so Karl Schmidt recognizes a sovereign dictator for example during revolutions when the revolutionary new government is in the process of establishing a new legal order. Anyway in both cases Schmidt sees that the core of this power is that of suspending the existing rights and suspending the whole of the normal legal rules. So the state of exception is a concept about the limit. It's the limit of law. The law comes until a certain point and after that it has to be suspended because something more important than the legality than the respect of rights comes in place and this you can note is exactly the same which happened during the recent crisis. What did they say? The main aim of any government is to make sure that the virus does not expand that there are no more cases of virus of people who are infected by the virus. However they were certain because you know that the famous PCR tests were fraud as well and they didn't find anything. The best statistics say that they have more than 95% of false positives so it doesn't mean anything but this was what the propaganda told us and told the whole world. What we have to do is to stop the virus because we don't have any cure, this was false again and at this point given this necessary situation the situation of emergency the governments in all the world gave themselves extraordinary powers and they did whatever was necessary according to their interpretation to make sure that this aim was respected. So we had the same thing which Schmidt recognized we had a situation where the limits of the law were suspended, were blocked. Agamben says that on the same page of the state of necessity state of exception is the right of resistance which significantly was what was opposed in the citizenship. We had the government taking extraordinary liberties and powers and on the other side the resistance of the citizens which was quite successful sometimes and even funny, we had funny years during the past and I participated to restaurants who kept open although there was the curfew and who didn't ask for the vaccine, passports and so on and there was a little resistance movement and it was on the same level so the resistance was illegal as the extraordinary powers were illegal. The book of Agamben gives a very interesting historical reconstruction of the state of exception and he gives a modern and an ancient origin of these extraordinary powers. The modern origin comes from World War I the big experiment in creating a new type of economy a new type of society where all citizens must necessarily collaborate for a common effort of beating the enemy was World War I. During World War I you had the suspension of the gold standard and of the species payment of the monies you had the fraud of the state titles for financing the war and you had a command economy in all countries which were involved in the war and especially in the United States there is a very interesting book by Mario Rothbard about the war economy in World War I and he aptly says that World War I was the way by which the progressive movement in the United States managed to get hold of the administration of the federal government and this was the experiment that transformed completely the United States and the transformation was complete during the Roosevelt era and the New Deal when the traditional and old liberties of the United States were lost. Basically what happened during World War I the idea has been to break up or better to say to fuse the traditional separation of powers usually you had an executive branch a legislative branch and a judicial branch and the legislative and the executive branch are fused together and this happens by means of the decrees. The decrees are decisions by the government which have the force of law and which are immediately applicable and sometimes not always they have to be approved by the parliament and the parliament is transformed in a gathering of yes men and yes women who just accept what the government does. This is the situation which is common in most European countries by now in Italy for sure. I made just personal statistics for the first six months of 2023 and more than 90% of whatever the parliament passed is just approval of government decrees. So in fact the laws are made by the government and the parliament is just there for saying yes. And the funny thing is that this proves that democracy is a scam and a fraud as well because you can vote as a citizen for the yes men in the parliament and they do whatever the government says. So for example in a country like Italy you have no chance to influence however the politics of the government because the most you can get is to vote your representatives in this assembly of clowns. It's a tire so we have the same laws in Italy so it's forbidden to offend the government. It's offense to the institutions of the republic and I have a few trials coming up for this crime. It will be happy to defend my clients and to see what we can do. By now on the side in criminal courts I was hugely successful not so much in civil and administrative courts where the judges are more in line with the government and they wouldn't go along. Anyway it's obvious because if someone is declared innocent of some crazy crime like offending the institutions of the republic no big harm done. If you have a class action for damages owing to the illegal laws of the government it's another thing and so they make sure that the judges are in line with the government. Another very interesting part of Agamben's book is the ancient historical reconstruction of the state of exception which goes back to an institution of the Roman law which was called Eustitium or Senatus consultum ultimum. Eustitium is a very interesting word because it has the same origin as solstitium. So the real meaning is Eustat. The law is silent stops and this is actually the meaning of this institution. It was the Roman version of the state of emergency and it was by all means a suspension of the law and a similar origin comes in the other expression which is the Senatus consultum ultimum so the last decision by the senate but ultimum has an etymological significance which comes from ults which means beyond. So the idea is that the senate authorizes any Roman citizens not only the magistrates to go beyond the law or better to say to take the force in their own hands and do whatever is necessary to avoid damage to the republic. That's also the formula that was used by the senate in these decisions. It is VDM consulate. So may the consul see whatever is expedient to save the state and what was expedient usually was killing someone. So this is at the end of the day someone or lots of people. This was at the end of the day the significance of this Senatus consultus ultimum. And what is also very interesting of the Roman experience is that at least according to some opinions what happened during this suspension of the laws was not to be judged according to the laws. So if some political opponent of the status quo was murdered during the state of emergency he could not be put on the trial for the crime afterwards. This was not always like that. The most important trial connected with the Eustizium is that of Cicero who killed the participants to the conspiracy of Catalina without due trial and for that he was put on trial afterwards and he was exiled. So it's not 100% sure how the treatment was. But the interesting thing is that the characteristics of the Eustizium are more or less the same of our modern state of necessity. So we have a status of enemy so there are no rules which is what often people say is the characteristics of anarchy. Anarchy is that there are no rulers but anomy is there are no rules so anything is possible. The aim is the preservation of the legal order the legal order of the Roman Republic. There is no legal evaluation because you start the law stops during this timing and you have a sort of free floating force free floating power. The same is true of the establishment of the empire the empire and especially the name of the emperors Augustus Augustus is the first but it was a title which was given to any emperor afterwards the name has the same origin of Autoritas and so the authority and it was the power of the senate it was not a direct power the senate did not have a direct power on the citizens but it gave the legal sanction or better to speak the sanction of the force of the state to whatever the magistrates did. So at the core of the state we find and this is very very interesting we find lawlessness. So what is in the innermost powers of the state is the power to suspend all the laws and so all governments all states and this is demonstrated by the state of necessity are illegal, are violators of rights of property rights, of rights of freedom, of life and so on and in this sense the quote from Kyle Schmidt that sovereign is he who decides about the state of exception is dramatically true sovereign is he who has the brute force to exercise power and decision as Kyle Schmidt would say without any restriction and without any legal restriction. So the conclusion of Agamben and it is a desperate conclusion is that law is void in its center law doesn't mean anything. Law, the law of the states is just brute force and oppression. His conclusion is so desperate that he wrote a recent article where he said I refuse our society because during these last years the society was made up of accomplices of people who wear accessories to the crimes that have been committed and it's just crimes and accessories to the crime we don't even have a real culprit because who is the culprit of the whole situation is not clear. Of course he is not a libertarian so he doesn't see that the culprit is this structure in which we are forced to live is the state, the government itself and so I think that starting from the desperate conclusion of Agamben he says it would be necessary to construct a totally different society but he doesn't know how we have a solution for a totally different society and we have a solution for a totally different way of examining law In human action, Mises' human action there is a quote, he modifies the quote of the motto of the Austrian emperor Ferdinand I and his motto was fiat justizia et periat mundus which means let justice be done even if the world has to be perished for the justice and Mises said no, we utilitarian economists we say fiat justizia ne periat mundus so let justice be done in order that the world does not perish so justice saves the world and I think this is the same attitude of libertarian way of interpreting law and justice and whatever is connected to justice and so I'd like to end my presentation with my suggestion of a personal solution first of all, there shouldn't be any state of exception in a legal rule the rules are those and you cannot deflect from the rules anyway and for any reason because the rules are the foundation of a just and acceptable society for anyone so the first question that you must confront as a libertarian jurist is this is there an objective test about what is law so how can we say what is law? as you know there are two schools of thought which I think are both equally flawed in some ways one is the positivist school of thought so in a nutshell you have different schools you have the American and British school you have the European continental school you have Hart and Kelsen and so on but in a nutshell it says that rules are the ones which are posited according to a valid procedure so for example Hans Kelsen who is the most famous European positivist says the laws are sort of a pyramid and at the top of the pyramid there's a basic norm which is not written and which is the rule that recognizes the power to set up a constitution and in the constitution you have the procedure to make valid laws and from there you go down the pyramid and you have all the laws which come after the basic norm anyway the question for the positivists is has the law been done according to the right procedure if yes then the law is valid and it is, this is funny, the excuse of most goons of totalitarian regimes the ones who worked in the Nazi concentration camps or in the Russian concentration camps they said I was just following orders and this is exactly what policemen said during these three years I talked to lots of policemen and I said do you see that this is all wrong you cannot tell shop to close or you cannot check these passports because this is illegal this is against fundamental human rights and the answer was I'm just following orders I'm not interested in what you're saying and this is the positivist attitude on the other side you have the school of natural law which is the idea that laws have to conform to certain principles to the nature of man, to divine law there's a big tradition of natural law according to religious principles so the natural law should be the reflection in human things of divine law I think that we libertarians can have a better answer to the question first of all what is law? my proposal is that law is something which deals with the fundamental relationship between man and time and in fact you have the three concepts which are always related to law which are life life is the relationship of man with the future if you die there's no future quite obviously liberty is the relationship of man with present and it is the right to use your body to use yourself according to your decisions and property is the relationship of man with the past so whatever you did in the past and in a lock-in fashion however you mixed your work with land with some external factor this establishes property and the other way of establishing property is pre-exchange so contracts and if you look at legal rules we all have some sort of relationship with life with liberty or with property so this is the content of law the second question is how can we establish which laws are just which laws are acceptable in a free society which rules do not infringe on the fundamental rights of human beings here in fact you don't have to look very far because the answer is here it's the ethics of argumentation so to establish what rules are right what rules are consistent with human nature you could say in a philosophical fashion you have to use the principles of the ethics of argumentation this means that you have to accept some basic rules of engagement in the rational discussion about law and jurisprudence and these basic rules regard self-ownership, acceptance of the other as an individual self-owner and once you establish these natural consequences of the ethics of argumentation you see clearly that almost all laws that we have enforced right now are illegitimate because as Frédéric Bastiat said law is perverted and what law is therefore is to make sure that a group of robbers and a gang of criminals has the right, the legitimate right to take away your property to take away your life and to do whatever we know states do and how they do it it is through the basic legal void which is at the core of the states and they do it through a psychological mechanism because although we libertarians know that all these rules are illegitimate they claim for themselves the legitimacy and legitimacy is a psychological phenomenon it is the conviction that this structure is the right structure and this structure has the right to impose laws on other people and this is where we have to fight and the means of fighting are twofold on the one hand we have to expose our ideas show how the things should be done and how a libertarian reflection of what law should look like and the other one the great power of the people is civil disobedience and this has been the great resource during these last years because civil disobedience was the strongest thing you could do to take away the power from the existing structure in fact if laws are not obeyed if the people rebel against laws you don't need any violence you just need to say no thank you I don't comply with these rules and this is a very very strong and powerful possibility and this may be a glimmer of hope for the future thank you for your attention