Problematizing Legitimacy and Authority in Law & Policy

Relational Authority and Legitimacy in International Relations

This essay develops a theory of relational authority in the most unpromising setting of international relations. Relational authority locates legitimacy in a social contract between a ruler, who provides a social order of value to the ruled, and the ruled who comply with the ruler's commands necessary to the production of that order. International politics are near universally assumed to be an ...

Law, Legitimacy and Black Revolution

Rationality, Legitimacy, & The Law

American legal realism was committed to examining legal reasoning in terms of the actual experiences of judges. Because the realist project sought to use social science tools to examine human nature, the contemporary rise of cognitive neuroscience provides an occasion for reexamining legal realism’s foundational critique of the law. Realism’s attempt to examine “the actual facts of judicial beh...

Biotechnology, bioethics and Liberalism: problematizing risk, consent and law.

At the conclusion of the famous article of 1953 announcing the molecular structure of DNA, Watson and Crick observed “that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for genetic material.” Six months later, Pope Pius XII addressed the First International Conference of Medical Genetics on ethical issues. The Pope said that since the aim of genetics ...

Legitimacy, Authority, and Hierarchy: Critical Challenges for Evidence-Based Medicine

This paper examines four challenges that proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM) must address to establish its claims to universality and legitimacy. It is argued that the failures to meet the evidence-of-effectiveness challenge, the authority challenge, the conflicting hierarchy challenge, and the definition-of-evidence challenge diminish arguments for the superiority of EBM. In the second...