Ratification’s Reason

Abstract

This article argues that the capacity of ratification to generate and ground legal legitimacy is poorly explained by existing modes of analysis such as historiography and political theory, and that it can instead be better explained by assessing ratification as an act of legal poiesis, a formal and poetic making of legitimacy theorized in terms of poetics. To develop this contention, it articulates a poetic model of ratification and considers a series of analogs in existing poems to identify their effects. This mode of analysis helps to explain the legal use of ratification, the specific epistemic qualities of legitimacy that follow from it, and the ways in which the structure of legitimacy might be changing under contemporary conditions.