{"id":2818,"date":"2026-08-14T14:49:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T18:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/?page_id=2818"},"modified":"2026-08-14T14:49:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T18:49:40","slug":"legitimacy-political-obligation-and-rule-of-law-beyond-the-unitary-state","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/in-print\/volume-23-special-issue-2025\/legitimacy-political-obligation-and-rule-of-law-beyond-the-unitary-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Legitimacy, Political Obligation, and Rule of Law beyond the Unitary State"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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 could function. This has significant consequences for our theories of political obligation, legitimacy, and the value of the rule of law, among others. If we want to provide moral guidance, we need to develop moral theories capable of speaking to quite different empirical conditions than we have recognized.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/23\/2026\/08\/23-S-Brown.pdf\">Continue reading Legitimacy, Political Obligation, and Rule of Law beyond the Unitary State<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"parent":2814,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2818","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2829,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2818\/revisions\/2829"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/public-policy-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}