Bringing together world-class scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of legal obligation, this book addresses key dimensions of the current debate: providing novel insights and perspectives, as well as critically discussing the leading theories of legal obligation. The notion of legal obligation is widely regarded as fundamental by both legal practitioners and legal theorists. For the language that explicitly refers to obligation is pervasive insofar as paradigmatic legal materials make reference to obligation either directly, by specifying what a subject is obligated to do, or indirectly, by attributing rights, privileges, powers, permissions, and other normative statuses to both single individuals and groups. There is, then, broad agreement that obligation constitutes a central element in legal studies. At the same time, however, there is considerable disagreement among contemporary legal theorists about how legal obligation can or should be elucidated. This book accounts for both the significance of obligation in law and the variety of views of legal obligation championed in legal philosophy today. With contributions from renowned theorists, this book will be invaluable for scholars and students of legal theory, legal philosophy, and jurisprudence.

Bringing together world-class scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of legal obligation, this book addresses key dimensions of the current debate: providing novel insights and perspectives, as well as critically discussing the leading theories of legal obligation. The notion of legal obligation is widely regarded as fundamental by both legal practitioners and legal theorists. For the language that explicitly refers to obligation is pervasive insofar as paradigmatic legal materials make reference to obligation either directly, by specifying what a subject is obligated to do, or indirectly, by attributing rights, privileges, powers, permissions, and other normative statuses to both single individuals and groups. There is, then, broad agreement that obligation constitutes a central element in legal studies. At the same time, however, there is considerable disagreement among contemporary legal theorists about how legal obligation can or should be elucidated. This book accounts for both the significance of obligation in law and the variety of views of legal obligation championed in legal philosophy today. With contributions from renowned theorists, this book will be invaluable for scholars and students of legal theory, legal philosophy, and jurisprudence.

This book focuses on a specific component of the normative dimension of law, namely, law's normative claim. By 'normative claim, ' meaning the claim that, inherent in the law, is an ability to guide action by generating practical reasons having a special status. The thesis that law lays the normative claim has become a subject of controversy. It has its defenders, as well as many scholars of different orientations who have acknowledged the normative claim of law without making a point of defending it head-on. It has also come under attack from other contemporary legal theorists and a lively debate has sprung up. This debate makes up the main subject of this book, which is in essence an attempt to account for the normative claim and see how its recognition molds our understanding of the law itself. This involves: (a) specifying the exact content, boundaries, quality, and essential traits of the normative claim, (b) explaining how law can make a claim so specified, and (c) justifying why this should happen in the first place. The argument is set out in two stages, corresponding to the two parts in which the book is divided. In the first part, the author introduces and discusses the meaning, status, and fundamental traits of law's normative claim. In the second section, he explores some foundational questions and determines the grounds of law's normative claim by framing an account that elaborates on some contemporary discussions of Kant's conception of humanity as the source of the normativity of practical reason. This is the first book in Hart Publishing, Oxford's new series Law and Practical Reason, which addresses fundamental issues in legal philosophy. The series will be of interest to students and scholars in moral, political, and legal philosophy

The focus of this monograph lies in the construction of a theory of legal obligation, understanding it as a discrete notion with its own defining traits. In this work, Bertea specifically addresses the question: how should legal obligation be distinctively conceptualized? The conceptualization of legal obligation he defends in this work gradually emerges from a critical assessment of the theories of legal obligation that have been most influential in the contemporary legal-theoretical debate. Building on such critical analysis, Bertea's study purports to offer a novel and unconventional conceptualization of legal obligation, which is characterized as a law-engendered intersubjective reason for carrying out certain courses of conduct.

H.L.A. Hart once argued that a theory suppressing the normative component of law "fails to mark and explain the crucial distinction between mere regularities of human behavior and rule-governed behavior." This is a serious drawback for a theory of law, since an important part of the legal domain is concerned with rule-governed conduct and may be expressed only by use of such notions as norm, obligation, duty, and right. These notions require us to acknowledge the existence of a normative dimension in the legal domain. This collection of essays contributes to the study of normativity in law by staging a thorough discussion of the notion, approached from three directions: the theory of planning agency, legal conventionalism, and the constitutivist approach. Though not offering an exhaustive picture of the current debate on the normativity of law, the book is meant rather to provide the reader with some authoritative statements of some widely-discussed families of views of legal normativity. Thus, the volume encourages a dialogue between different traditions of study and stimulates those who would not otherwise look outside their tradition of thought to engage with new ideas. The underlying idea of the collection is that no general theory of normativity can be put forward unless it addresses distinct - albeit interrelated - disciplines, such as the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, theory of action, meta-ethics, social philosophy, political theory, ethical theory, and jurisprudence. (Series: Law and Practical Reason)