Dear Reader, The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy gratefully presents the final issue of Volume 23. The annual Special Issue presents a symposium hosted by our partner, the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. This year’s symposium is dedicated to expounding “The Ethics of the Rule of Law.” As we […]

Political philosophers advance normative claims about civic ethics. Many of these, I show, rely on a hidden empirical premise: that the state has a particular structure and set of capacities that I call the unitary sovereign state. Unfortunately, this model proves not only inaccurate but unrealistic as a vision of how governing institutions do or […]

According to one prevalent narrative, the rule of law is a bloated, rhetorical concept, suited more for condemning what one does not like and applauding what one does, than for any precise theorizing or careful analysis. It attracts enthusiasm in the abstract, but proves unhelpful for evaluating specific laws and institutions. Moreover, the wide scope […]

The principle of juridical bivalence is often taken to be an unquestionable truth about the general structure of the law. According to this principle, legal standards should be thought of as either applying or not applying in a given situation; and so, the claims and assertions of courts ought to present themselves in a similar […]

Military rule is common across the world, but this form of government is incompatible with the rule of law for various reasons. To prevent this, Western democracies such as the United States impose a strong norm of civilian supremacy over military officials. The most important role of this norm of “civilian control” in America today […]

Establishing the rule of law requires two elements. First, an articulation of the concept that there is a higher law above the government from which the government derives its legitimate authority but which also constrains the exercise of that power. Second, an effective institutional structure for citizens to actually enforce the rule of law’s limits […]

Law must simultaneously satisfy two competing demands: it must be correct, meaning well-adapted to current social circumstances, and certain, meaning knowable and stable enough for citizens to form reliable expectations and long-term plans. This paper argues that these two properties are fundamentally in tension. Drawing on the work of Bruno Leoni and Friedrich Hayek, the […]

On April 12, 1963, Civil Rights protestors affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led by, among others, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were arrested en masse in Birmingham, Alabama, in just one of many such protests throughout the turbulent decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Written during his subsequent confinement, and in […]

This paper presents an analysis of the ethics of vigilantism through the lens of the Rule of Law. For clarity’s sake, the paper sets aside borderline cases and adjacent practices just as terrorism, doxing, and political assassinations in order to focus on classical vigilantism: the unauthorized use of violent force by a civilian to punish […]

Violent protests against state injustice have gained increasing attention from political philosophers in recent years. One view which has emerged here is that many real-world states’ claim to legitimate authority—including liberal democratic states—is undermined by the pervasive social and racial injustices that mar them, and that—against this background—violent protests may have an important political role […]

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the existence of certain technocratic features of American government. For better or worse, expert agencies were given wide degrees of latitude to set public health policy. Many of the policies that governed us during the COVID era were the result of rule by expert, of a kind. For example, the […]