The book comprises a preface and nine chapters: States of Emergency, Very Strong Measures, Take It on the Chin, You Must Stay at Home, The Lockdown Bites, Patchwork Summer, The Darkest Winter, Step by Step, and Freedom Regained? Adam Wagner is a human rights barrister at Doughty Street Chambers—Keir Starmer's old outfit—who, documenting the legal ramifications of coronavirus restrictions on Twitter, and acting in key cases on the human rights impacts of the pandemic, became one of the UK's go-to experts on pandemic-era laws and their civil liberties implications. The slapdash way in which law and guidance started to be produced then became a tsunami of contradictory statements that even the authors couldn't understand, let alone the people required to enforce them, especially the police. Die Schreibwaren sind im Büro, in der Schule und Zuhause allgegenwärtig und auch im Computerzeitalter nicht aus dem Alltag wegzudenken.

The book's subtitle is How we Lost our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters, and Wagner's book is full of detail about the level of authoritarian restrictions implemented during the pandemic.But Adam Wagner makes many good points, and has a lot to contribute to preparation for the next pandemic or similar emergency. Reviewers said that the book was a definitive regarding, and the 'fullest account' of, law during the pandemic. Parliamentary scrutiny was extremely limited by design as a matter of course, laws making every day behaviour illegal were made by a handful of people in opaque meetings with no minutes, and bizarre exemptions were craved out for political reasons. Which is now, proven to be more deadly due to mental health than the pandemic and incredibly beneficial to a select few. He was described in the House of Lords as 'the only person in the country who can make sense of this variety of regulations'.

The point he misses is that nothing short of lockdown was at the relevant moment sufficient to be confident of contain the pandemic and saving lives, and therefore only lockdown was proportionate to the threat.Just as a history of the time, it is an important reminder of the period but also how government can take advantage of situations.

In this book, Wagner argues that COVID-19 restrictions in the United Kingdom brought the country as close to a police state as in living memory. Those people included the more than 200,000 that died from Covid19 infection where government imposed unbelieveably hard to understand laws, with haphazard changes, implemented as laws and guidelines where few understood the difference.We should all be very concerned about the ways in which concentration of power and lack of scrutiny allowed not only incompetence but also corruption with devastating consequences. Jonathan Sumption argues that an attitude of refusing to form opinions due to a claim lack of expertise, as applied by Wagner in the book, contributed to the publics acceptance of restrictions and if applied in the future would result in sacrificing humanity to technocrats. The author has a lawyer's sense of injustice and he conveys well the sheer scope of these restrictions’ impact on people's lives, and—often—their lack of precedent. Emergency State demonstrates why Adam Wagner rapidly became the indispensable authority on the unprecedented restrictions on liberty that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic.