Philip Bobbitt
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Philip Chase Bobbitt (born July 22, 1948, Temple, Texas), is an American author, academic, and public servant who has also lectured in Britain. He is best known for work on military strategy and constitutional law and theory, and as the author of The Shield of Achilles.
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[edit] Family origins
Philip Bobbitt is the only child of Oscar Price ("O.P.") Bobbitt (died 1995) and Rebekah Luruth Johnson Bobbitt (1910-1978). Though he rarely identifies himself as such, Bobbitt is a nephew of Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States from 1963 to 1969; Rebekah Bobbitt was the eldest sister of the 36th president.
[edit] Scholar of law and history
Bobbitt graduated with an A.B. from Princeton University in 1971. In 1975 he received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was marked by the teaching of Charles L. Black (1915-2001); Black became a mentor to Bobbitt. After graduation, Philip Bobbitt clerked for Judge Henry Jacob Friendly (1903-1986) of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was recruited to teach at the University of Texas at Austin, where he began to teach in 1976, and where he now holds the A.W. Walker Centennial Chair and teaches constitutional law. Bobbitt has also taught at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he was Anderson Senior Research Fellow and a member of the Modern History faculty in 1981; later he taught at King's College London as Marsh Christian Fellow in War Studies. From 1981 to 1982 he was visiting research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He received a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1983. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia Law School.
[edit] Views on Constitutional Law
Professor Bobbitt has three sentences that he wants his students to take from his constitutional law class, and one in particular frames his class: "Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional", from McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). Therefore, he expects the analysis of the constitutionality of a federal issue to test first scope, then means, and then prohibitions. He also emphasises the modalities of constitutional argument: 1) structural; 2) textual; 3) ethical; 4) prudential; 5) historical; and 6) doctrinal. He has argued in his books for the recognition of the ethical modality, which has to do with the vision we have of the nation and the role government ought to play. Bobbitt also teaches a constitutional law class around the Federalist Papers, discussing in detail the concerns of the late 18th century as a means of framing contemporary legal and social issues. His Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution is in common use in courses on constitutional law throughout the U.S.
[edit] Government service
Bobbitt has also served extensively in government, for both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1970s, he worked with Lloyd Cutler on the charter of the Central Intelligence Agency (Austin Chronicle, June 21, 2002). He has worked in the White House as associate counsel to the president, the Senate, the State Department, and the National Security Council, where Bobbitt served as the director for Intelligence, senior director for Critical Infrastructure, and senior director for Strategic Planning.
[edit] The Shield of Achilles
In 2002 Philip Bobbitt published The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, an ambitious 900-page work that is both a theory, even philosophy, of historical change in the modern era, and a history of the development of modern constitutional law. Bobbitt traces interacting patterns in the (mainly modern European) history of strategic innovations, major wars, peace conferences, international diplomacy and constitutional standards for states. Bobbitt also suggests possible future scenarios and policies appropriate to them, especially from an Americocentric angle.
Arguing that "law and strategy are not merely made in history . . . they are made of history" (p. 5), Bobbitt presents a dynamic view of historical change that has a dark, tragic dimension, for he holds that the painful and, indeed, atrocious process of resolving issues that create conflict and war tends to cause changes that render obsolete the solution to that conflict (generally a new form of the state possessing a new principle of legitimacy), even as it is established. This tragic dimension is evoked in the title of Bobbitt's book, inspired by the extraordinary last lines of Book 18 of Homer's Iliad, describing a shield fabricated for Achilles by the Hephaestus, across the "vast expanse" of which "with all his craft and cunning/the god creates a world of gorgeous immortal work" (trans. Robert Fagles).
The Shield of Achilles generated much interest in the diplomatic and political community. Dignitaries who follow Bobbitt's works include the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard. In his 18th June 2004 address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Howard directly cited Bobbitt's argument that the ‘change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as anything that the state has thus far undergone.’[1]
[edit] Other activities
Since 1990, Bobbitt has endowed the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded biennially by the Library of Congress. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former trustee of Princeton University. He occasionally writes essays, typically on foreign policy, published in The New York Times, The Spectator, and The Guardian (of London).
[edit] Writings
[edit] Books
- Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-19-503422-8
- Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-00523-7
- American Nuclear Strategy: A Reader. (Co-editor, with Gregory F. Treverton and Lawrence Freedman.) New York: New York University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8147-1107-3
- Tragic Choices. (Co-author: Guido Calabresi.) New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. ISBN 0-393-09085-X
- Constitutional Interpretation. Blackwell, 1991. ISBN 0-631-16485-5
- The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History. Foreword by Michael Howard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. ISBN 0-375-41292-1 (Paperback [2003] ISBN 0-385-72138-2)
- Wars Against Terror. Knopf/Penguin, forthcoming, 2007.
[edit] Articles
- "War Powers: An Essay on John Hart Ely's War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath." Michigan Law Quarterly 92, no. 6 (May 1994): 1364-1400. (Argues for the unconstitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.)
