The Duty to Obey the Law

Under what conditions, if any, do those the law addresses have a moral duty or obligation to obey it simply because it is the law? Political and legal theorists since Plato have developed a wide range of answers to this question, as well as numerous objections to those answers. This essay aims primarily to provide the newcomer with a point of entry into the debate over the existence and grounds of the duty to obey the law. In light of this goal, I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive survey of all the different justifications that philosophers and political theorists have offered for such a duty. Instead, I identify five general approaches to carrying out this task, and offer a somewhat detailed discussion of one or two examples of each approach. This method allows for closer analyses of the arguments offered by proponents and critics of specific attempts to justify the duty to obey the law than would be possible in a comprehensive survey (or at least one shorter than a book-length treatment of this issue). Moreover, in many cases such a focus clarifies the challenges that any example of a given general approach must overcome. Discussion of each general approach to justifying the duty to obey the law concludes, however, with a footnote that lists additional examples not discussed in this essay. 1 In the interest of clarity and ease of exposition, the following study ignores several potentially important issues, which I simply note here. First, while some theorists draw a conceptual distinction between duty and obligation, I treat those two concepts as equivalent. Second, though there is more to the modern state than its legal order, and not 1 Other recent surveys of the field include 2 every legal order exists within a state, the terms 'law', 'legal order', and 'state' will be used interchangeably; for instance, by referring in some cases to a duty to obey the law, and in others to a duty to obey the state (or the state's directives). Third, the discussion herein will usually proceed in abstraction from the legal categories of citizen, resident alien, legal visitor, and illegal visitor or immigrant; instead, I will refer to those alleged to have a duty to obey the law as the state's subjects, or as those within the law's jurisdiction. Finally, while this essay will focus on the duty of individuals to obey the …