Sir Philip Chase Bobbitt (born July 22, 1948) is an American legal scholar and political theorist. He is best known for work on U.S. constitutional law and theory, and on the relationship between law, strategy and history in creating and sustaining the State. He is currently the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School and a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas School of Law.
Henry Kissinger called him "the outstanding political philosopher of our time". He is the author of several books, including Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (1982), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002), and Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-first Century (2008).
Early life and education Philip Bobbitt was born in Temple, Texas, on July 22, 1948. He is the only child of Oscar Price Bobbitt Jr (1918–1995) and Rebekah Luruth Johnson Bobbitt. Oscar Price Bobbitt Jr was the son of Oscar Price Bobbitt Sr (1892–1965) and Maude Wisner, a direct descendant of Henry Wisner of Swiss descent, the only delegate from New York to vote for the Declaration of Independence.Lancaster Intelligencer, July 2, 1800 (reprint); Boston Centinal, July 14, 1817 (obituary of Thomas McKean, noting that McKean and Wisner had been present on July 4, 1976 and voted for independence) Rebekah Bobbitt was the daughter of Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines. Her father and grandfather were members of the Texas Legislature; her great-grandfather was president of Baylor University. Her brother was Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. Between high school and college, Bobbitt spent a summer with Johnson at the White House.
At the age of 15, Bobbitt graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School, where he was elected president of the student council, in 1964.John Bobbitt, The Bobbitt Family in America, pp ____ (1985) He then attended Princeton University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy in 1971. His student thesis, "On Wittgenstein and a Philosophical Topology," was one of the earliest attempts to argue for an underlying continuity between the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations.P.C. Bobbitt, On Wittgenstein and a Philosophical Topology (of file, Princeton University Library); compare Peter Winch, Introduction, in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (1969), published 18 months before Bobbitt's thesis It was advised by philosopher Richard Rorty. While at Princeton, Bobbitt was president of the Ivy Club and Chairman of the Nassau Literary Magazine.The Nassau Herald, "Philip Chase Bobbitt," p. 43 (1971).
Bobbitt left Princeton after three semesters to enter AmeriCorps VISTA. He worked in a poverty program in an all-black area of Los Angeles for two years before returning to college. “No Retreat in Poverty War for LBJ Kin,” Daily News (New York), Monday, November 13, 1967; “President’s Nephew Promises to Stay On In Venice Poverty Area,” The San Bernardino County Sun, p. 3, Monday, November 13, 1967. In 1975, he received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School, where he was the articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. It was at Yale that he met Charles L. Black Jr. (1915–2001), who became a friend and mentor.
After law school, Bobbitt clerked for Judge Henry Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Aaron P. Brecher, ; see also David M. Dorsen, Henry Friendly: Greatest Judge of His Era (2012) He then received his D.Phil. in modern history from the University of Oxford in 1983 as a member of Nuffield College.
Career Bobbitt's first book, Tragic Choices (1978), was written with Yale Law Professor (later Dean and Judge of the Second Circuit) Guido Calabresi. The book was a study of how societies make difficult decisions concerning resources and rights—e.g., who gets expensive medical care, who is to be drafted into the army, who may have children, and other society-defining choices. Tragic Choices has won a number of awards and is studied by multiple disciplines, including law. It has been especially influential in the field of bioethics and was discussed in several countries during the COVID-19 virus pandemic. Writing in The Times of London about the pandemic, Philip Collins said, "The tragic choice is the pivot of the action in classical tragedy, and a perennial dilemma in the history of philosophy. The best book on how tragedy turns up in politics is Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt's Tragic Choices...In each case a moral imperative clashes with the scarcity of resources."
His second book, Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution, first proposed the model of the six fundamental forms of constitutional argument. One critic subsequently called it, "the outstanding recent work treating constitutional law in terms of the legitimating effects of constitutional argument. It ranks among the most original and impressive works of American jurisprudence to appear during the decade." In 1994, Akhil Amar described Constitutional Fate as "one of a handful of truly towering works of constitutional theory in the last half-century." Henry Monaghan, Harlan Fiske Stone Professor of Constitutional Law, Columbia School has said of Constitutional Fate, "I did not realize it at the time Constitutional Fate was published, but I do now. This is the most important and influential book on judicial review written in my lifetime."Constitutional Fate, 2d edition, forthcoming 2021
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 was the Marsh Christian Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London 1994–1997. From 1981 to 1982, and again in 2004 he was visiting research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Until 2007, Bobbitt 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; he is now the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia and director of the Center for National Security there. He remains distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas Law School and senior fellow in the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas.
Bobbitt has delivered the Mellon Lectures at Oxford University, the Murphy Lecture on Constitutional Law at Princeton, the All Souls College Lectures at Oxford University, among several honorary lectures. In 2016 he was awarded the Jean Mayer Global Citizen Award by Tufts University.
He has been elected a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Pacific Council on International Affairs, the American Society of International Law, a Life Member of the American Law Institute, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 1994, he was a Fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington. He serves as a member of the Commission on the Continuity of Government and served on the Task Force on Law and National Security of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. For some years he has been a juror for the Civil Courage Prize. In May 2010, he was appointed to serve as a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law. In 2011, he was elected to membership in the Common Room at All Souls College, Oxford. In 2012, Bobbitt was appointed to the External Advisory Board for the Central Intelligence Agency, on which he served until January 2017.
Views on constitutional law Like many contemporary scholars, Bobbitt believes that the Constitution's durability rests, in part, in the flexible manner in which it can be and has been interpreted since its creation. He 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 traditional vision we have of the nation and the role government ought to play (some scholars call this form "argument from tradition"). 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 asserts that all branches of government have a duty to assess the constitutionality of their actions. Bobbitt's "modalities" of constitutional law are now generally considered to be the standard model for constitutional arguments.
Government service Bobbitt has served extensively in government, for both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1970s, he was Associate Counsel to President Carter for which he received the Certificate of Meritorious Service,Records of the White House office of Counsel to the President: A Guide To Its Records. Jimmy Carter Library, at 143. and worked with Lloyd Cutler on the charter of the Central Intelligence Agency. He later was Legal Counsel to the Iran-Contra Committee in the U. S. Senate, the Counselor for International Law and member of the Senior Executive Service 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. He was a principal draftsman of PDD63, the first presidential document to establish a strategy for critical infrastructure and cyber protection. Subsequently, he was strategist in residence to the Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, and has lectured at West Point, Annapolis, and the National Defense University where for some years he delivered the annual opening keynote lecture.
Other works In the early '80s, Bobbitt published Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy. This book argued that US nuclear targeting had gone through reciprocal cycles, alternating between total and graduated response regimes. These cycles were driven, he argued, not by changes in the central deterrence relationship between the American homeland and the homelands of its adversaries but by developments in extended deterrence—the protection of non-homeland theatres by US nuclear forces. An accompanying volume, US Nuclear Strategy: A Reader was edited by Bobbitt, Gregory F. Treverton and Sir Lawrence Freedman.
Bobbitt's most recent two books are second editions of classics in US law, The Ages of American Law by Grant Gilmore, first published by the 1970s which Bobbitt brought up to present time; and Impeachment: A Handbook by Charles Black. Impeachment was doubled in size, and was widely discussed during the various Trump proceedings. Both books were published by the Yale Press.
Bobbitt is currently at work on The Constitution Trilogy for Oxford University Press.
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.