Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member of Johns Hopkins, and also a former health commissioner in Baltimore City.

Until now, our sole focus has been COVID-19.

We are broadening the podcast to other urgent public health issues,

beginning with racism, police violence,

and the national protests over the homicide of George Floyd.

In this episode, I speak with Professor Echo Yanka of Yeshiva University.

Professor Yanka is a law professor and philosopher who studies the intersection between political philosophy and the criminal justice system.

Let's listen.

Professor Yanka, thank you so much for joining me.

You are a law professor and a philosopher,

and you think and write about the criminal justice system, including the legitimacy of the police.

And I think it is obvious to look at the protests that are going on in the United States and around the

world, that the legitimacy of the police is very much being questioned.

And I guess I want to start with a question for you,

which is, you know, where does the legitimacy of the police come from?

And, you know, what do we mean when we say it's being questioned?

First of all, thank you for having me.

You know, political philosophers spend a lot of time arguing about what legitimacy means and what it would look like.

But at the very basic level, I think legitimacy means something like laws and norms that can be accepted by those who find themselves governed by

them. Right. So either they can be accepted or more practically, we should think that they are

largely accepted. Not everybody will accept every law or not every, certainly not, and not everybody will

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