In 195 B.C., Roman matrons flooded the streets to the Forum and confronted senators. They were not seeking a privilege — they demanded repeal of an old restriction.
The law they opposed, the Lex Oppia, had been enacted 20 years before, at the darkest hour of the Second Punic War, when Hannibal threatened Rome and its finances and morale were in free fall. In the name of emergency sacrifice, it limited women’s display of wealth: how much gold they could possess, what kinds of clothing they could wear and whether they could ride in carriages within the city.
Years later, with Carthage defeated and Rome flush with spoils, the law stayed on the books. What began as wartime austerity became a moral crusade. Defenders no longer argued about survival, but about virtue.
Two millennia later, the pattern feels familiar: measures adopted under the banner of “emergency” do not retire easily. The Supreme Court recently struck down tariffs imposed by President Trump. The president introduced the tariffs nominally as a response to necessity that could not wait on Congress, and the White House has now vowed to keep the program alive through other avenues. As with the Lex Oppia, what was sold as an emergency measure is being made to look normal.
Tariffs touch prices, jobs and livelihoods, including in New Hampshire, where manufacturers and exporters feel policy shifts quickly. But our purpose is not to referee any tariff schedule. We are not trade lawyers. The deeper story is institutional, not partisan: governments accumulate extraordinary powers, and those powers rarely vanish because the crisis, or the rationale, has changed.
We approach this as a historian and an economist who have written about the persistence of emergency legislation. Governments rarely surrender authority voluntarily; they adapt, reinterpret and redeploy it. Emergency-style governance accelerates this: it compresses deliberation into executive discretion, narrows accountability and asks citizens to trade transparency for speed. Even when courts draw lines, the precedent remains. Agencies learn the playbook, and later administrations refine it. The names on the door change, but the incentives do not.
The Roman case is instructive precisely because it is so distant. It prevents us from telling ourselves comforting stories about modern uniqueness. The Lex Oppia was enacted amid danger: Rome had suffered catastrophic losses, and the state needed money, unity and discipline.
Emergency laws in such moments can feel obvious and necessary. Yet when that moment passed, the law did not simply expire. It persisted because incentives shifted. A restriction born of fiscal panic became a tool for moral signaling and social control. Emergency measures can outlast emergencies because they develop new constituencies, new rationales and new uses.
This is not to say every emergency power becomes permanent, or that every government act is an irreversible ratchet. Democracies can repeal laws. Courts can strike them down. Legislatures can reassert themselves. But the asymmetry is real: it is easier to create authority than to dismantle it, easier to act in a crisis than to later unwind the machinery, easier to defend a tool once it exists than to admit it should never have existed in the first place.
That is why the tariff ruling matters even if one has no strong feelings about tariffs. The point is not “Trump is uniquely lawless” or “the Court is uniquely courageous.” The point is that emergency-style governance has become a habit of mind in modern states. When one pathway is blocked, leaders search for another. They do not abandon the objective — they shop for a different justification. Often, they succeed, because the public’s attention moves on while the institutional apparatus remains.
The Romans who defended the Lex Oppia believed they were protecting the republic from decay. Their opponents believed they were restoring normal life after abnormal times. Both sides were arguing over something larger than gold and garments: whether powers justified by emergency should be allowed to become ordinary.
The remedy is not to cheer when courts block one maneuver, as if the temptation has been cured. The remedy is restraint: narrower delegations, real sunset clauses, Congress owning the hard choices and citizens skeptical whenever leaders invoke crisis to bypass ordinary debate and consent. Courts can enforce limits, but they cannot supply the habits of self-government. The Roman women who filled the Forum eventually won repeal, but the deeper lesson is vigilance.
History rarely repeats, but in an aphorism often attributed to Mark Twain, it rhymes. This rhyme scheme often begins with a proclaimed emergency and ends with permanence.
Christopher J. Dawe, Ph.D., is a historian of education. Lucas Rentschler, Ph.D., is a professor of economics at Utah State University. They are both New Hampshire natives.