Webber on Gilead Constitutionalism @GregoireWebber @queensulaw @LSELaw

Grégoire Webber, Queen's University Faculty of Law; London School of Economics, Law School, has published Gilead Constitutionalism as Queen's University Legal Research Paper 2024-001. Here is the abstract.

This essay explores the concept of government by drawing on the liberal tradition of limited government. In that tradition, moral autonomy and independence are situated as the source of limits on government justified on other grounds. An alternative relationship between government and moral autonomy and independence is here examined, one according to which such autonomy and independence lie at the very heart of the justification for government rather than limiting its activity. The task of government is thus conceived as enabling moral autonomy and independence. One consequence of this way of understanding the justification for government is to deny that a government uncommitted to the liberal ideas of autonomy and independence counts as a government. Drawing on the example of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I explore how the claim of the officers of Gilead to be a government fails: in indiscriminately violating moral autonomy and independence, those officers are tyrants, oppressors, dictators, autocrats—but they are no government. This essay, to be included in a collection in celebration of Leslie Green, concludes by exploring how Green’s contributions to our understanding of government and governing were developed in conversation with one whose ideas on many matters were at a great distance from Green’s own. Green’s example of honourable engagement is a reminder of how progress in jurisprudence is facilitated by seeking the truth in charitable collaboration with others.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. NB: There are two versions of this article.