Euan MacDonald (University of Edinburgh – School of Law) has posted Legitimacy as Liberty on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I set out and defend a general, liberty-based account of legitimacy. My goal is to persuade the reader that there is no real mystery to what we usually mean when we appeal to the notion of legitimacy. The account that I propose takes as basic the notion of legitimate action, and defines this in terms of a liberty to act. The starting point for my understanding of ‘liberty’ is Hohfeld’s classic schema of fundamental legal positions. I then identify eight ‘puzzles’ about how we use the concept of ‘legitimacy’ (for example, how it relates to legality, validity and justice), and show in each case how a liberty-based account allows us to resolve the puzzles in a way that preserves the intuitions that competent speakers have about the meaning of the term, whilst providing significant gains in clarity and rigour.