Sir Philip Chase Bobbitt (born July 22, 1948) is an American legal scholar and political theorist.

[4] At the age of 15, Bobbitt graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School, where he was elected president of the student council, in 1964.

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

[13][14] 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.

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."

Like many contemporary scholars, Bobbitt believes that the Constitution's durability rests, in part, in the flexible manner in which it can be and has been interpreted since its creation.

In the 1970s, he was Associate Counsel to President Carter for which he received the Certificate of Meritorious Service,[21] and worked with Lloyd Cutler on the charter of the Central Intelligence Agency.

[citation needed] In the early '80s, Bobbitt published Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy.

This book argued that US nuclear targeting had gone through reciprocal cycles, alternating between total and graduated response regimes.

An accompanying volume, US Nuclear Strategy: A Reader was edited by Bobbitt, Gregory F. Treverton and Sir Lawrence Freedman.

[42] Lady Bobbitt took her BA, summa cum laude, at the University of Pennsylvania where she gave the Commencement Address at her graduation.

Bobbitt traces interacting patterns in the (mainly modern European) history of strategic innovations, major wars, peace conferences, international diplomacy, and constitutional standards for states.

they are made of history" (p. 5), Bobbitt presents a dynamic view of historical change that has a dark, tragic dimension, for he holds that the painful and, indeed, atrocious process of resolving issues that create conflict and war tends to cause changes that render obsolete the solution to that conflict (generally a new form of the state possessing a new principle of legitimacy), even as it is established.

This tragic dimension is evoked in the title of Bobbitt's book, inspired by the last lines of Book 18 of Homer's Iliad, describing a shield fabricated for Achilles by Hephaestus, across the "vast expanse" of which "with all his craft and cunning/the god creates a world of gorgeous immortal work" (trans.

Public officials who followed Bobbitt's works included Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair;[43] the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who built his Dimbleby Lecture around Bobbitt's thesis [44][45][46] and the former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger[47] The Shield of Achilles was the 2003 Grand Prize Winner of the Hamilton Awards and the Arthur Ross Book Award Bronze Medalist of the Council on Foreign Relations for Best Book in Foreign Policy of that year.

British military historian Michael Howard wrote, The Shield of Achilles "will be one of the most important works on international relations published during the last fifty years", and Paul Kennedy, writing in The New York Review of Books argued that it may "become a classic for future generations."

Terror and Consent was on both the New York Times and the London Evening Standard’s best-seller lists and was widely reviewed.

"[50]Tony Blair wrote of Terror and Consent, "It may be written by an academic but it is actually required reading for political leaders.

"[51] David Cameron, the leader of the UK Conservative Party put it on a list of summer reading for his parliamentary colleagues in 2008.

In this book he argues that only by understanding The Prince as one half of a constitutional treatise on the State (the other being Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy) can we reconcile the many otherwise contradictory elements of his work.