Philip 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.

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.

It was at Yale that he met Charles L. Black, Jr. (1915–2001), who became a friend and mentor to Bobbitt.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Bobbitt clerked for Judge Henry Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

He is the only child of Oscar Price Bobbitt Jr (1918–1995) and Rebekah Luruth Johnson Bobbitt.

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".

Philip Bobbitt was born in Temple, Texas, on July 22, 1948.

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.

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.

It was advised by philosopher Richard Rorty.

While at Princeton, Bobbitt was president of the Ivy Club and Chairman of the Nassau Literary Magazine.

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.

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.

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."

From 1981 to 1982, and again in 2004 he was visiting research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

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).

He received his Ph.D. in modern history from the University of Oxford in 1983 as a member of Nuffield College.

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.

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.".

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.

Until 2007, Bobbitt held the A.W. Walker Centennial Chair at the University of Texas, where he taught constitutional law.

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.