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Few books in the history of the world have had a stronger, more lasting, or more errant impact than Machiavelli's The Prince. One of its first interpreters called it "a courtier's Koran." A copy was found in Napoleon's abandoned coach at Waterloo, and Hitler was said to have kept a copy at his bedside. Over the centuries, the view of the Machiavellian prince as a ruthless, immoral tyrant has dominated, but in this fascinating examination of the author and his work, scholar and statesman Philip Bobbitt argues that this is a misunderstanding stemming from mistranslations, political agendas, and readers overlooking Machiavelli's earlier Discourses on Livy. In The Garments of Court and Palace, Bobbitt debunks these myths and explains that Machiavelli's argument was about the need to distinguish between a ruler's personal and governing ethos. As a constitutional scholar and political philosopher with a deep personal knowledge of governance, Bobbitt is uniquely qualified to explain both Machiavelli's ideas and their relevance to the complicated political situation of his day. Rather than a "mirror book" advising rulers, The Prince prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of the neoclassical state. Using both Renaissance examples and cases drawn from the current era, Bobbitt shows Machiavelli's work is both profoundly moral and inherently constitutional, a turning point in our understanding of the relation between war, law, and the state. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1048/thumbnail.jpg

Philip Bobbitt follows his magisterial Shield of Achilles with an equally provocative analysis of the West's struggle against terror. Boldly stating that the primary driver of terrorism is not Islam but the emergence of market states (like the U.S. and the E.U.), Bobbitt warns of an era where weapons of mass destruction will be commodified and the wealthiest societies even more vulnerable to destabilizing, demoralizing terror. Unflinching in his analysis, Bobbitt addresses the deepest themes of history, law and strategy. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1049/thumbnail.jpg

The two-handed saw is a foresters' instrument that two men use, one at each end, sawing in reciprocating rhythm. The blade of the best two-handed saws balances a sharpened stiffness with a shimmering flexion; its use requires individual strength and skill at cooperation. Because Gene Rostow too combined these opposing qualities – indeed had them in abundance – it is especially noteworthy that one day, using such a saw as a young man in New England, he severely injured his back, keeping him out of active service in World War II and causing recurrent difficulties throughout his gallant life. Was he unyielding for just a moment when giving in would have spared him? Did the other man pull too hard, throwing Gene off balance despite his strength, or push to an extreme that was unnatural for Gene? You see, it takes a certain unyieldingness to insist that Japanese Americans not be interned after the devastating military and psychological blow at Pearl Harbor. Only someone with a strong frame could possibly resist the near-universal pull of public and governmental opinion. There was a certain fierce dignity in Gene's contempt for racism, not unlike that of the colleagues he recruited to Yale – Charles L. Black, Jr., of course, but also Grant Gilmore, Boris Bittker, Myres McDougal, and the young Guido Calabresi – who made the Yale Law School a strong redoubt for civil rights.

The Youngstown holding is widely admired. One reads with pride those passages in which the Supreme Court denies to a president with whom they are in considerable political sympathy the power to enlarge executive authority by militarizing the homeland. And yet one wonders, as we confront in the 21st century a lethal foreign enemy who has demonstrated the ability to infiltrate and assault the domestic environment, precisely what restraints ought to govern a presidential response to that enemy.

The Shield of Achilles is a classic inquiry into the nature of the State, its origin in war, and its drive for peace and legitimacy. Philip Bobbitt, a professor of constitutional law and a historian of nuclear strategy, has served in the White House, the Senate, the State Department, and the National Security Council in both Democratic and Republican administrations, and here he brings his formidable experience and analytical gifts to bear on our changing world. Many have observed that the nation-state is dying, yet others have noted that the power of the State has never been greater. Bobbitt reconciles this paradox and introduces the idea of the market-state, which is already replacing its predecessor. Along the way he treats such themes as the Long War (which began in 1914 and ended in 1990). He explains the relation of violence to legitimacy, and the role of key individuals in fates that are partially – but only partially – determined. This book anticipates the coalitional war against terrorism and lays out alternative futures for the world. Bobbitt shows how nations might avoid the great power confrontations that have a potential for limitless destruction, and he traces the origin and evolution of the State to such wars and the peace conferences that forged their outcomes into law, from Augsburg to Westphalia to Utrecht to Vienna to Versailles. The author paints a powerful portrait of the ever-changing interrelatedness of our world, and he uses his expertise in law and strategy to discern the paths that statehood will follow in the coming years and decades. Timely and perceptive, The Shield of Achilles will change the way we think about the world. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1052/thumbnail.jpg

The Constitution is not perfect. Indeed I don't know what 'perfection' is in a constitution, since it is an instrument for human hands and thus must bear within its possibilities all the potential for misuse that comes with the user. What I am sure of is that 'perfection' does not mean 'never needs to be amended,' since one important part of the Constitution is its provision for amendment (although I am inclined to believe that few of the amendments to the U.S. constitution were actually necessary.) That said, a competition to find the "stupidest provision of the Constitution" is, to my mind, about the most vapid essay contest to come along since MTV listeners were asked to suggest names for a new litter of puppies owned by a heavy metal performer. As anyone who has been around dogs knows, their names have to do with their individual natures, and the relationships they have with each other, and with their masters. Naming them in the abstract is idle, a parlor game maybe, or perhaps appropriate to cats (whose character, if they have any, is opaque to humans.) The Constitution functions as an organic whole. All the forms of argument-historical, textual, structural, ethical, prudential, doctrinal-entirely depend on this principle. One cannot begin to construe correctly the "commander-in-chief power" without bearing in mind the Congress's power to appropriate money for the armed forces; nor can one adequately construe in any concrete case, the Congress' power to declare war without squaring it with the Executive's power to deploy troops where he, and he alone, thinks best. Remove one part of the Constitution and you change another. In a mature democracy these relationships are sufficiently complicated and well-developed that any particular change is likely to have a number of unanticipated consequences, including, often enough, a result conflicting with the campaign by which the amendment was secured in the first place.

Constitutional interpretation is an issue which has come under considerable scrutiny in the USA, in the light of such happenings as the nomination of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court, and the Iran-Contra affair. This book is intended as an overview of the debate on constitutional interpretation, and employs historical, textual, doctrinal, prudential, ethical and structural methods of criticism. It also tries to show how constitutional issues are addressed by different people, such as the President, Members of Congress and students of political science. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1053/thumbnail.jpg

Red, White, and Blue addresses the pervasive presence of five general theories of American constitutional law. These theories reflect particular jurisprudential ideologies governing, among other things, the legitimacy of certain arguments, the appropriateness of certain occasions for judicial intervention and the constitutional basis for judicial review. What makes this book interesting and important is that it provides an unwitting or at least unself-conscious example of the general theorizing it wishes to explain. For this reason, its descriptions of the particular family of theories that characterize American constitutional jurisprudence are distorted, while it disclaims any account of the particular set of objections that the author poses to these theories. Instead, Professor Tushnet relies on the most recent version of the reductionism of law to politics to explain the failure of these theories: "the crisis of contemporary liberal political theory. But whatever its etiology, this current crisis can scarcely account for earlier occurrences of these fundamental general theories of constitutional argument. I hope the reader of this review will be able to see why this reduction, and why the array of arguments deployed by Professor Tushnet against the theories he presents (and even his own explanations of those theories), are largely dictated by the approach he has adopted – an approach that is as much a part of the traditional family of general theories as any of the others and to which the current crisis in liberalism, if such it be, is equally irrelevant.

I have been a fellow traveler of the Committee on the Constitutional System virtually since its inception; indeed, I believe I was present when Mr. Cutler first made the speech at the University of Texas that became, "To Form a Government." During all this time I have never been able to quite free myself from the conviction that his concerns were absolutely right and fundamental to our era. Nor have I been able to persuade myself that the reforms that he recommends justify a departure from the framers' conception. I suppose this is why I was selected to give a critical view of his proposals and his talk.

This book provides an assessment of future problems, particularly the neglected connection between strategy and proliferation, and an analysis of various ways of coping with these problems. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1068/thumbnail.jpg

Here, Philip Bobbitt studies the basis for the legitimacy of judicial review by examining six types of constitutional argument – historical, textual, structural, prudential doctrinal, and ethical – through the unusual method of contrasting sketches of prominent legal figures responding to the constitutional crises of their day. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1054/thumbnail.jpg

Although it has been observed that approaching an allegedly universalistic theory by asserting the time- and culture-bound nature of that theory is an attack of some sort, Professor Ball does not take my lectures to be a rebuke to the enterprise in which he, Professor Tushnet, and others are engaged. Instead, he complains that I do not examine the relation between constitutional argument, on the one hand, and, on the other, social, political, and economic interests. This is a mistaken reading of my work. It is nice to be told that Tushnet and Ball accept my formulation "that in our theories are our fates" and that they go on from there, but if they really accepted my formulation they would accept the bankruptcy of "going on from there." For the point the formulation tries to achieve is that theoretical requirements have driven law; that judicial review is legitimated by these theoretical moves and not by what are thought to be more fundamental social and class motives; that the vocabulary of social and economic interest is itself just one more set of theoretical conventions, and, indeed, one of little relevance to constitutional decisionmaking; that the constitutional types of argument are not determined by political and economic theory.

Originally published at the height of the Watergate crisis, Charles Black's classic Impeachment: A Handbook has long been the premier guide to the subject of presidential impeachment. Now thoroughly updated with new chapters by Philip Bobbitt, it remains essential reading for every concerned citizen. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1015/thumbnail.jpg

Setting the terms for an effective public debate on nuclear issues, this provides essays and excerpts from longer works that have charted the development of American nuclear strategy. Each section ends with questions for study and analysis with suggested further reading. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1067/thumbnail.jpg

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Bobbitt, P.: Terror and consent: the wars for the twenty-first century. - New York/N.Y. : Knopf, 2008. - 688 S