In articulating the juridical relationship between the individual and the state, a theory of public law must confront a fundamental problem. The practice of public law involves appeals to ideas of both authority and justice, but these ideas appear to be antagonistic rather than complementary. On the one hand, persons must act in conformity with legal obligations enacted through the contingent exercise of public authority. On the other, persons must act in conformity with timeless ideals of public justice. The theoretical puzzle at the core of public law stems from the incompatibility of these convictions. Because enacted laws are often unjust and just laws are rarely enacted, persons often find themselves simultaneously pulled in one direction by the demands of public authority and pulled in another by the demands of public justice. To escape this tension, the leading theories invariably fragment their subject matter by reducing the whole of public law to one of its aspects, authority in abstraction from justice or justice in abstraction from authority.
The purpose of this project is to articulate a unified theory of public law that integrates the distinctive claims of authority and justice into a common framework. My central claim is that once authority and justice are appropriately conceived and justified, they are neither antithetical virtues of opposing theoretical frameworks nor isolated notions. Instead, authority and justice are the mutually implicating principles of a legal system: the right of rulers to exercise public authority is always accompanied by a duty to govern justly; the right of the ruled to just governance presupposes the presence of publicly authoritative institutions. By setting out the character and interrelation of the fundamental components of a legal system, the unified theory illuminates the general practice of public law from the legal systems of the ancient world to the inner workings of modern constitutional states.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/43751 |
| Date | 14 January 2014 |
| Creators | Weinrib, Jacob |
| Contributors | Ripstein, Arthur |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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