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Legitimacy has been a key concept of Western family law for hundreds of years. The test of legitimacy determined who belonged to a family and who did not. In principle, legitimacy entitled children to maintenance and inheritance from both parental sides. Illegitimacy did not unconditionally do so. This article reflects on why legitimacy appeared as a significant part of the ecclesiastical policy and legislation from the mid-twelfth century onwards and why legitimacy could remain an indispensable part of European family law for at least seven hundred years until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Beetham has recently made an impressive contribution to the understanding of Legitimacy which he holds to be central to both political and social theory. As a social science concept, capable of playing a significant part in the explanation of the workings and breakdowns of political systems, however, legitimacy so defined proves difficult, sometimes impossible, to apply and runs the serious danger of misleading explanation. The case against legitimacy is argued through a combination of theoretical and empirical considerations and in place of legitimacy a case is made for the experience of government behaviour and the capacity for collective action as the more fruitful foci of social theory.

As they relate to the Supreme Court, institutional legitimacy and policy legitimacy have most frequently been studied in isolation. In this article, a holistic framework is proposed and examined. The political capital hypothesis holds that the Supreme Court can introduce institutional support in its efforts to generate legitimacy for particular policies, but that the Court risks its institutional backing by advancing controversial edicts. Therefore, institutional legitimacy functions as an expendable political capital with which the Supreme Court can confer some increment of policy legitimacy. Two experiments are conducted to test this dynamic, with results providing strong support for the hypothesized process of legitimation.

This article makes three points. First, the police need public support & cooperation to be effective in their order-maintenance role, & they particularly benefit when they have the voluntary support & cooperation of most members of the public, most of the time. Second, such voluntary support & cooperation is linked to judgments about the legitimacy of the police. A central reason people cooperate with the police is that they view them as legitimate legal authorities, entitled to be obeyed. Third, a key antecedent of public judgments about the legitimacy of the police & of policing activities involves public assessments of the manner in which the police exercise their authority. Such procedural-justice judgments are central to public evaluations of the police & influence such evaluations separately from assessments of police effectiveness in fighting crime. These findings suggest the importance of enhancing public views about the legitimacy of the police & suggest process-based strategies for achieving that objective. 64 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2004.]

Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an enumeration of the informational requirements for assessing legitimacy in hopes of finding a conceptualization that better utilizes available survey indicators to tap relevant macro dimensions. I specify formal measurement models for both conventional and revised conceptualizations of legitimacy orientations and compare the fit of the two models systematically on data from the U.S. electorate. The revised model appears preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.