Law’s Moral Legitimacy

This book offers a novel jurisprudential account of law by arguing for a conceptual understanding of participation as foundational to a general explanation of law and legitimate authority. In doing so, the book challenges dominant accounts, arguing that the existing failure to separate an explanation of law’s authority from the concept of its legitimacy has left a general explanation of law incomplete. From this, the book argues, both general jurisprudence and broader society have suffered. This is especially so for societies that tend to fall outside the Euro-American concern of much mainstream analytical jurisprudence.The historical experience of such societies, however, reveals much of normative and analytical significance. Bringing together normative, historical archival, and case study analysis, the book develops a positive account of law that highlights the importance of participation as a multifaceted process in the continuous historical development of law and legal system in any society. This account, the book argues, is crucial to a more complete explanation of law’s authoritative function and normative legitimacy. The book’s account of participation, further, foregrounds a broader and more normatively robust understanding of the relationship between a general explanation of law and other philosophically fundamental ideals, namely: freedom, justice, democracy, and deliberation. The book’s examinations, which integrate arguments from scholarship in African political philosophy with mainstream arguments in analytical jurisprudence, lead it to new and original answers to longstanding questions in legal philosophy about the nature of law’s authority, it’s legitimate justification and, the grounds also, for collectively disobeying it.