Philip Bobbitt

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Philip Chase Bobbitt (born July 22, 1948) 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: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002) and Terror and Consent (2008).

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[edit] Family origins

Philip Bobbitt was born in Temple, Texas. He is the only child of Oscar Price 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. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1971 where his thesis advisor was Richard Rorty. In 1975 he received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was Article Editor of the Yale Law Journal and taught at Yale College. It was at Yale that he met 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 after which he returned to Austin. His first book Tragic Choices (1978), written with Yale Law Professor (later Dean and Judge of the Second Circuit) Guido Calabresi was a study of how societies make certain decisions---who gets expensive medical care, who is to be drafted into the army, who may have children, and similar choices by which societies are defined. It has won a number of awards and is studied in other disciplines as well as law. Until 2007, he held the A.W. Walker Centennial Chair at the University of Texas, where he taught constitutional law. In 2005 he was the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School; in 2007, Bobbitt was the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he accepted a permanent chair later that year. Bobbitt was also at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he was Anderson Senior Research Fellow and a member of the Modern History faculty from 1983 to 1990; later he taught War Studies at King's College London 1994-1997 as the Marsh Christian Fellow. From 1981 to 1982, and again in 2004 he was visiting research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He received his M.A and Ph.D. (Modern History) from Oxford in 1983.

[edit] Views on Constitutional Law

Above all, Professor Bobbitt believes in the rule of law. This commitment is especially valid in the United States where the nation's constitution is its particular strength. Like many contemporary scholars, Bobbitt contends that the constitution's durability rests, in part, in the flexible manner in which it has been interpreted since its creation. In teaching about this seminal document, 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 emphasizes 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. He first introduced these forms of argument---or modalities---as a way of understanding constitutional review generally in "Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution" (1982), a study of judicial review and then broadened their application to constitutional review generally in Constitutional Interpretation (1993) which deals with non-judicial examples of constitutional argument and decision making. 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 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 was Associate Counsel to the President Carter and worked with Lloyd Cutler on the charter of the Central Intelligence Agency (Austin Chronicle, June 21, 2002). He later was Legal Counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee in the U. S. Senate, the Counselor for International Law at the State Department during the George H. W. Bush administration, and served at the National Security Council, where he was director for Intelligence Programs, senior director for Critical Infrastructure, and senior director for Strategic Planning during Bill Clinton's presidency.

[edit] The Shield of Achilles

See main article at The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History

In 2002 Philip Bobbitt published The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, an ambitious 900-page work that explicates a theory, verging on philosophy, of historical change in the modern era, and a history of the development of modern constitutional and international 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.

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 the United Kingdom, Tony Blair; the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who built his Dimbleby Lecture around Bobbitt's thesis; and Senator Hillary Clinton who discussed it in her Barbara Jordan Lecture.

In his 18th June 2004 address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, then Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, directly cited Bobbitt and Joseph Nye. Quoting from the book's prologue, Howard stated "In his acclaimed book, The Shield of Achilles, Phillip Bobbitt argues cogently that we are: ‘at a moment of world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state: only states could muster the huge revenues, conscript the vast armies, and equip the divisions required to threaten the survival of other states.’ This is no longer true, Bobbitt says, owing to advances in telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. He goes on to claim that: ‘The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as anything that the state has thus far undergone.’" Howard went on to state that he "cite(d) these two respected thinkers for a simple reason. To demonstrate that the perils we face today do not spring from the imaginations of George W. Bush, Tony Blair or John Howard. Nor are they the invention of some neo-conservative group in Washington. This is the uncertain world we live in."[1]

The book and its thesis has also been discussed by the Vice-President of India, Prince Hassan of Jordan, and other political figures. It is currently being translated into Mandarin by a team at the University of Beijing.

[edit] Other activities

Since 1990, Bobbitt has endowed the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded biennially by the Library of Congress. It is the only prize given by the nation for poetry. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former trustee of Princeton University. He occasionally writes essays, typically on foreign policy, published in The New York Times, and The Guardian (of London).

[edit] Writings

[edit] Books

[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.)
  • "The Warrantless Debate Over Wiretapping." The New York Times, August 22, 2007. (Argues for the necessity of legislation amending the legal framework for the interception of communications from foreign sources.)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Transcript of the Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP - Address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Westin Hotel, Sydney, 18 June 2004

[edit] External links