Tuesday Calendar
- Oxford Jurisprudence Discussion Group: Stephen Perry, Associative Obligations and the Obligation to Obey the Law. Here is a taste:
-
One of the strands woven into the complex fabric of Law’s Empire is an argument that there exists, under certain conditions, a general moral obligation to obey the law. Whether or not there can ever be such an obligation is an age-old problem in political philosophy, and Dworkin’s argument is offered, in part, as a contribution to that particular philosophical tradition. But it is more than that, because the argument also constitutes an integral part of Dworkin’s general theory of law. That is why I say it is one strand of a complex fabric; for Dworkin, political and legal philosophy are inextricably connected. For many of the philosophers who have addressed the question of political obligation, as I shall call it, there is no such inevitable connection. Notice, to begin, that no respectable theory of political obligation ever claimed that a person is obligated no matter what to obey the laws of a legal system to which he or she is subject. Every minimally plausible theory sets out certain conditions under which such an obligation is said to arise, and Dworkin’s is no exception. Many such theories have, however, regarded these conditions as ones that do not figure in any essential way in the concept of law itself. They assume that law constitutes a system of norms the existence and content of which can be established by, say, looking to certain kinds of social facts, and then asking whether or not a given legal system meets a set of independently specifiable conditions; if these conditions are met, then a general obligation to obey is said to exist. Arguments based on consent are often (although not necessarily) of that form; they look to an independently specifiable condition that asks whether or not everyone who is subject to a legal system has validly consented to obey its laws, whatever they are. The argument from fair play is also of this form; it looks to an independently specifiable set of conditions that asks, first, whether the content of the norms of the system show it to be a mutually beneficial scheme of cooperation, and, second, whether or not those subject to the system have “accepted” its benefits.2 There are, as Dworkin points out, well-known problems with both arguments if they are regarded as the basis of a general obligation to obey the law, since it is never the case that everyone subject to any given legal system has validly consented to obey it or has accepted, in the appropriate sense, certain benefits it happens to provide (LE at 192-95). My present point, however, is that these arguments treat the philosophical problem of political obligation as for the most part independent of the philosophical problem about the nature of law.
Georgetown University School of Law: Abbe Smith.
Northwestern Empirical Legal Studies: Margaret Brinig, William G. Hammond Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Iowa, “The Effect of Change in Child Custody Standards”.
Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies: Richard Whitecross, Legal Culture: Bringing the Theoretical and Empirical Closer Together: Citizenship and Belonging: Law and Identity in a Himalayan State.
Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre: Dr Christine Greenhalgh & Dr Mark Rogers, Intellectual Property in the New Millennium: The Use of Intellectual Property by the UK Financial Services Sector.