"The way that law can delineate preserves of lawlessness — much as it draws borders around national..."

“The way that law can delineate preserves of lawlessness — much as it draws borders around national parks — obsesses both right and left. And it’s an issue everywhere. I write this in Egypt. An emergency law suspending ordinary rights and justice — allowing detention without trial, trial without evidence, military courts, sentence without appeal — has been in effect in one or another form for all but about 20 of the last 113 years. There’s a curfew now, the Cairo streets close down at 9 PM, tanks hunch at intersections, you can be arrested for wearing a beard. What Putin is doing in Sochi is simply another version: making the city an emergency zone, restricting rights of movement, putting bodies in extralegal cages, using terror as a reason. There are people, though, for whom the emergency isn’t an exception. There are people who endure the state of emergency every day. Sex law has never worked the way the rest of law does. It doesn’t play by the same rules or ask for similar evidence. Law tends to see sex as an emergency where the regular principles don’t apply.”

- The emergency of everyday life: What activists who care about the Russia Olympics should learn from sex workers, and why | a paper bird (via melissa)