The phrase "acquire legitimacy" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts where one seeks to gain acceptance, recognition, or validation for an idea, action, or entity.
Example: "The organization worked hard to acquire legitimacy in the eyes of the public after the scandal."
Alternatives: "gain legitimacy" or "establish legitimacy."
President Bush's turn to the United Nations for help in Iraq was a welcome, if belated, recognition that global policing can acquire legitimacy only through multinational endorsement.
Just as Italy's Reds hoped to acquire legitimacy by severing ties with the Soviet-led bloc of Leninist parties, the Islamists of Tunisia may be willing to seek respectability by cutting connections with harder-line advocates of political Islam, including the Brotherhood.
Empirical research on a sample of Milanese fashion designers allow us to determine whether or not fashion designers use art as a means to acquire legitimacy and to create an identity, thereby institutionalising their field of cultural production (fashion) as artistic.
They had to acquire legitimacy.
It seeks to reconcile universals and particulars, the possible and the hoped-for, as well as acquire legitimacy through use and usefulness over time.
As the Iraqi government acquires legitimacy, the hateful resistance -- which has killed many more Iraqis than Americans -- will lose its standing.
And ever since the arranged marriage of the blues and Tin Pan Alley, jazz has been built on outrageous pairings that only later acquired legitimacy.
Publishers are watching closely to see whether Amazon is building a next generation of talented authors who will have no connection to them — and in the process acquiring legitimacy in literary circles.
Drug cocktails have acquired legitimacy from several lifesaving applications.
Thus, sexual intercourse between adolescents -or between an adolescent and an adult-somehow acquired legitimacy if it was done within a formal union.
All this puts off investors and makes it harder for above-board operators to acquire the legitimacy they crave.
