Abstract: Constituent power is an idea with a long tradition in modern political thought but has been largely abandoned since the middle of the twentieth century. Here I offer a new account of constituent power that avoids problems of the classical account, including the paradox of constitutionalism, and clarifies how individuals contribute to creating their shared political order. I argue that constituent power should be understood as an individual power-with: the agential power to constitute a legal order with others. Our individual, banal acts of law-abidingness each partially effect the collective outcome. We generally exercise constituent power unconsciously and automatically, guiding our actions to succeed as defined by law and relying on the legal system to take up our contributions and effectively combine them with others.

Abstract: Courts and jurors sometimes refuse to assign liability to defendants on the basis of statistics alone, despite their apparent reliability. I argue that this refusal is best understood as a recognition of defendants’ right to security. Understood as a robust good in Philip Pettit’s sense, security requires that someone risking harm to others’ protected interests adopt a disposition of concern that controls against wrongfully harming them. Since trials risk harm, the state must adopt such a disposition. Statistics leave open the possibility of innocence and so wrongful harm in a way that the state cannot ignore; if it does use such statistics, it makes defendants wrongfully insecure. This explanation of the problem of bare statistical evidence is especially apt because security grounds the right to a fair trial and judicial procedural rights more generally.

Abstract: I argue that legitimacy discourses serve a gatekeeping function. They give practitioners telic standards for riding herd on social practices, ensuring that minimally acceptable versions of the practice are implemented. Such a function is a necessary part of implementing formalized social practices, especially including law. This gatekeeping account shows that political philosophers have misunderstood legitimacy; it is not secondary to justice and only necessary because we cannot agree about justice. Instead, it is a necessary feature of actual human social practices, which must be implemented via practitioners' discretion in changing contexts.

Abstract: Exclusionary defeat is Joseph Raz’s proposal for understanding the more complex, layered structure of practical reasoning. Exclusionary reasons are widely appealed to in legal theory and consistently arise in many other areas of philosophy. They have also been subject to a variety of challenges. I propose a new account of exclusionary reasons based on their justificatory role, rejecting Raz’s motivational account and especially contrasting exclusion with undercutting defeat. I explain the appeal and coherence of exclusionary reasons by appeal to commonsense value pluralism and the intermediate space of public policies, social roles, and organizations. We often want our choices to have a certain character or instantiate a certain value and in order to do so, that choice can only be based on a restricted set of reasons. Exclusion explains how pro tanto practical reasons can be disqualified from counting towards a choice of a particular kind without being outweighed or undercut.

Abstract: By appeal to the phenomenon of presupposition accommodation, Rae Langton and others have proposed that speakers can gain genuine authority over their audiences when they implicitly claim such authority and the audience accommodates them. I address this argument in two ways. First, I explain where and why we should expect authority within particular conventional practices to be able to be gained by accommodation, considering the balance of values and norms that authority claims implicate. Second, I argue that audiences will often have good reason to accommodate the speaker without recognizing a claim of authority over them. To explain how audiences can accomplish this, I propose the mechanism of social accommodation. In social accommodation, audiences exercise control over the context in order to bring speakers and their utterances into conformity with background social norms, including moral, legal, and religious norms. In this way audiences can impose their understanding of the prevailing valid norms onto speakers.

Abstract: An institution's purpose matters at a fundamental level for its legitimacy. We usually theorize purpose in combination with a specified bundle of features that describe a particular institution. While this is useful and necessary for coming to a final theory of legitimacy for that institution, it is often unclear what role any given feature plays on its own. In this article I theorize the role of institutional purpose on its own, clearing the way for a more general theory of legitimacy that is especially useful when applied to novel institutions. I consider three sets of issues. First, it matters whether the institution's purpose is impermissible, merely permissible, or morally mandatory (although precisely how it matters is more complex than it may appear). Second, sometimes it matters how close to achieving its purpose an institution gets and it matters whether we are considering a hypothetical justifying purpose or an extant purpose. Third, considering extant purpose raises a variety of its own problems which I suggest can only be solved by adopting a more minimalist conception of legitimacy of the sort I defend elsewhere.

Abstract: Contrary to the widely accepted consensus, Christopher Heath Wellman argues that there are no pre-institutional judicial procedural rights. Thus commonly affirmed rights like the right to a fair trial cannot be assumed in the literature on punishment and legal philosophy as they usually are. Wellman canvasses and rejects a variety of grounds proposed for such rights. I answer his skepticism by proposing two novel grounds for procedural rights. First, a general right against unreasonable risk of punishment grounds rights to an institutionalized system of punishment. Second, to complement and extend the first ground, I more controversially propose a right to provision of the robust good of security. People have a right to others' protecting for avoiding wrongfully harming them: when I take an action that is reasonably expected to threaten the protected interests of others, I must take appropriate care to avoid setting back those interests. Inflicting punishment on someone--intentionally harming them in response to a violation--is prima facie wrongful, so I can only count as taking appropriate care in punishing when I follow familiar procedures that reliably and redundantly test whether they are liable to such punishment, i.e. whether they have forfeited their right against punishment through a culpable act.

Abstract: Traditional approaches to authority focus on the problem of the subject sacrificing her autonomy by deferring to the will of another. Yet authority is ultimately a relationship, making demands upon both parties. In particular, a relational approach highlights 1) the vulnerability of the subject to the authority and 2)the authority's paired demand that the subject make herself vulnerable and the acceptance of responsibility for that demand and its consequences. I argue for an instrumentalist conception of authority according to which one party only has genuine authority over another when four conditions are met: the duty, precedence, acceptance, and trustworthiness conditions. 

Abstract: "Civil" disobedience is consistent with violence, in particular violence directed at property. It is inconsistent with violence directed at persons because such violence directly contradicts the core commitment of the disobedient. Namely, disobedients necessarily commit themselves to an understanding of the political according to which others are understood as co-participants in the common project of living together. Such a commitment means that disobedients must address others as reason-respecting beings and so cannot do violence to them. Violence against property, however, does not per se undermine the commitment to the political. Focusing on the commitment to the political is a helpful corrective to the mistaken Rawlsian focus on fidelity to law and allows political disobedience to be understood as a coherent contestatory practice in a wider variety of contexts.

Abstract: There is an underlying general notion of legitimacy that applies to all institutions, political or otherwise. To see this we must get away from the statist focus on the right to rule and instead, following Allen Buchanan, focus on how legitimacy functions practically. Legitimacy identifies those institutions which have the right to function and need only correlate with a duty not to coercively interfere with that functioning or with institutional insiders' fulfillment of their institutional roles. This general idea can then be applied to any kind of institution, from the local bakery to the state to the European Union, depending on each institution's constitutive functioning and what demands it makes on individuals.

Abstract: Discussions of political obligation and political authority have long focused on the idea that the commands of genuine authorities constitute content-independent reasons. Despite its centrality in these debates, the notion of content-independence is unclear and controversial, with some claiming that it is incoherent, useless, or increasingly irrelevant. I clarify content-independence by focusing on how reasons can depend on features of a source or container. I then solve the long-standing puzzle of whether laws constituting content-independent obligations is consistent with the fact that some laws must fail to bind due to their egregiously unjust content. Finally I defend my understanding of content-independence against challenges and show why it retains a place of special importance for questions about the law and political obligation.

Abstract: The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology further and show how the special issue’s individual contributions apply it to their cases. In the first section, we provide a sketch of our purpose-dependent theory of legitimacy beyond the state. We then highlight two features of the institutional context beyond the state that set it apart from the domestic case: problems of feasibility and the structure of international law.

Abstract: Is there anything that unites the diverse goods of love and friendship, of the virtues of character, and of respect? In The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect (RDG, Oxford University Press, 2015), Philip Pettit argues that the goods of attachment, virtue, and respect all share a common basic structure: they are all, in Pettit’s terminology, ‘robustly demanding’ (RDG, p. 2). Pettit puts forward a novel way of thinking about important goods that he plausibly suggests sit at the core of the good life for a human being. Along the way, he offers a partial defense of a non-orthodox consequentialism that incorporates elements of virtue ethics and Kantianism, as well as offering insights into moral psychology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. In this special issue, five philosophers grapple with the arguments and the implications of Pettit’s book, and Pettit engages with their contributions in a careful and extensive response. In this introduction, we outline the core idea of a ‘robustly demanding’ good, we explain how Pettit employs it, and we sketch the main arguments of the five contributing authors.