This book offers an account of the formation of the discipline of public law with a view to identifying its essential character, explaining its particular modes of operation, and specifying its unique task. Public law is conceived broadly as a type of law that comes into existence as a consequence of the secularization, rationalization, and positivization of the medieval idea of fundamental law. Formed as a result of the changes that give birth to the modern state, public law establishes the authority and legitimacy of modern governmental ordering. Public law today is a universal phenomenon, b ... More

This book offers an account of the formation of the discipline of public law with a view to identifying its essential character, explaining its particular modes of operation, and specifying its unique task. Public law is conceived broadly as a type of law that comes into existence as a consequence of the secularization, rationalization, and positivization of the medieval idea of fundamental law. Formed as a result of the changes that give birth to the modern state, public law establishes the authority and legitimacy of modern governmental ordering. Public law today is a universal phenomenon, but its origins are European. Part I of the book examines the conditions of its formation, showing how much the concept borrowed from the refined debates of medieval jurists. Part II then examines the nature of public law. Drawing on a line of juristic inquiry that developed from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries — extending from Bodin, Althusius, Lipsius, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Pufendorf to the later works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Smith, and Hegel — it presents an account of public law as a special type of political reason. The remaining three parts unpack the core elements of this concept: state, constitution, and government. By explaining the way that these core elements of state, constitution, and government were shaped respectively by the technological, bourgeois, and disciplinary revolutions of the 16th–19th centuries, public law is revealed to be a subject of considerable ambiguity, complexity, and resilience.