State of exception 

Coming from an intellectual background of Roman private law and comparative legal history (of private law), I did not pay that much attention to the concept of the Ausnahmezustand. I knew it was there, I had read Schmitt owing to his popularity in Poland and the cliché of "Schmittian politics", but I did not think there was much I could contribute to the field myself. At the same time, my interest in Polish legal and political history of the state-socialist period meant that the Martial Law (stan wojenny), proclaimed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski on 13 December 1981 was an important object of my historical (but not strictly scientific) interests. It was only when my dear and learned friends, Cosmin Cercel and Gian Giacomo Fusco were working on a volume on the States of Exception, to be published by Routledge, that I realised that - why not - perhaps I could contribute with a piece on the Martial Law. Given that the book had a solid philosophical background, with Schmitts and Agambens flying all around, I considered it would be a bit simplistic not to engage with that high theory. And so I decided to write a properly theoretical piece on the Martial Law of 1981, looking at it through the lens of Carl Schmitt's theory and merging that perspective with that of historians of Polish law, and notably one of my favourite authors, Professor Lech Mażewski. When the book just came out, the world came to a standstill in the most dramatic imposition of the state of exception, which prompted me and my learned critical friends to prepare a special issue of the Folia Iuridica devoted to the "Return of the Exception". My last piece, on exceptio popularis, was, in turn, prompted by the strange idea of the Polish Prime Minister not to publish a judgment of the Constitutional Court outlawing abortion, and even to justify it publicly and officially by mass protests. I had a hunch that some kind of new politico-juridical institute in statu nascendi is looming behind the corner, and after inspecting the works of Agamben, Benjamin and Schmitt, I came up with the concept of a 'people's state of exception.'