Oxford University Press (2008)
Abstract |
This book examines the relationship between the idea of legitimacy of law in a democratic system and equality, conceived in a tripartite sense: political, legal, and social. Exploring the constituent elements of the legal philosophy underlying concepts of legitimacy, this book seeks to demonstrate how a conception of democratic legitimacy is necessary for understanding and reconciling equality and political legitimacy by tracing and examining the conceptions of equality in
political, legal, and social dimensions.
In the sphere of political equality this book argues that the best construction of equality in a democratic system - which resonates with the legitimizing function of majority rule - is that of equality of political opportunity. It is largely procedural, but those procedures represent important substantive values built into a majoritarian system. In the sphere of legal equality it argues that a plausible conception of non-discrimination can be constructed through a "reflective equilibrium"
process, and should reject a thoughtless assumption that the presence of some particular criteria of differentiations necessarily taints a legal classification as discriminatory. Finally, the chapters on social equality explore, in some detail, the currently influential, and presumptively attractive,
"luck egalitarianism": the idea that social equality calls for neutralizing the disparate effects of bad brute luck upon a person's position in society.
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Keywords | Legitimacy of governments Democracy Philosophy Equality before the law |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
Buy this book | $69.17 new (29% off) Amazon page |
Call number | K370.S228 2008 |
ISBN(s) | 9780199545179 0199545170 |
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Law's Legitimacy and Democracy
This chapter prepares the ground for the discussion of legitimacy of democratic laws by considering the relationship between law's legitimacy, its justification, and the obligation to obey the law. If legitimacy of law is seen as based on the law being justified (as in Raz's ‘service conce... see more
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Doing Justice to Rights and Values: Teleological Reasoning and Proportionality. [REVIEW]Giovanni Sartor - 2010 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 18 (2):175-215.
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