Republican Authority
Published in modified form in M.N.S. Sellers, REPUBLICAN LEGAL THEORY, Chapter VI, Macmillan, 2003
25 Pages Posted: 11 Jun 2008 Last revised: 4 Sep 2008
Date Written: 2003
Abstract
The proper jurisdiction of lawful authority has always been a central issue in Anglo-American jurisprudence. English and American legal institutions both grew out of a seventeenth- century British culture that valued liberty, and sought to defend it through law, by carefully defining the scope and proper purpose of lawful authority. Yet after 1776 the two nations diverged. English lawyers began to reconceptualize the authority of law in language developed to counter seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European revolutionary thought. British reactions to the English, American and French republics introduced Hobbesian conceptions of legal authority into legal discourse, which still influence common-law jurisprudence today, and mislead English-speaking lawyers who have adopted British terminology. Achieving justice through law will require a more precise vocabulary. Republican legal theory offers valuable corrections to the positivist misconceptions of Thomas Hobbes' latter-day (and often unwitting) disciples.
Keywords: republicanism, legal theory, theory of law, legal history
JEL Classification: K1, K4
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation