Legal rules become binding only when supporters hold enforcement power

Evidence

As Madison also recognized, however, parchment prohibitions can be converted into meaningful constraints when the political process is arranged in such a way that political actors who support constitutional rules and rights have the power to defend them. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 471

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the Madisonian parchment-barrier tradition and to the reader’s own framework on embedded vs. rhetorical ideology - a text only binds if a constituency defends it. — connects to: Entrenchment mechanisms work through groups with aligned preservation interests — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 471; Judges act as temporally extended representatives of their appointing party.; A law binds only because sovereign will chose to be bound by it — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 197 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Legal rights are unenforceable when the entire community opposes them #corroborates (0.92) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 37
• A law binds only because sovereign will chose to be bound by it #corroborates (0.88) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 197
• Legal prohibition without religious-institutional embedding remains only nominal #corroborates (0.78) — , The Rod and the Child, 8206
• Conflicting overlapping authorities forced citizens to intuit whom to obey #qualifies (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 908