Law Commons^™

Reflections Inspired By My Critics, Philip Chase Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The crucial idea in constitutional law is legitimacy; the crucial idea in jurisprudence is justification.

For some time, the academic debate about U.S. constitutionalism has looked for justifications for our practices, believing this would confer legitimacy on them. In my work, I have endeavored to derive legitimacy from the practices themselves, reserving the task of justification for other purposes.

By showing the way in which legitimacy is established and maintained in a constitutional system like ours, I hoped to derive solutions to a number of classical questions, all of which, I believe, are at bottom questions about legitimacy and legitimation. …