Ben Barros has a nice post on Prawfs entitled Socrates and Obedience to Law. Here is a taste:
If Socrates’ broad language in the Crito is seen as being hyperbolic in his assertion that disobedience to the law is always unjust, then his language dismissing the relevance of his obligations to his children can also be seen as hyperbolic. In this reading of the Crito, Socrates’ broad language is addressed to the correct course of conduct for Socrates in his particular circumstances, rather than the issue of just conduct more generally. Because there was no conflict between Socrates’ obligations to the laws, the god, and his children, it was just for Socrates to obey the law and accept his sentence. If circumstances had changed, however, the outcome may have been different, and it may have been just for Socrates to disobey the laws.
Venturing onto dangerous ground since my ancient Greek is self-taught and very limited, I wonder if there are two confounding factors in attempting understand Plato’s Socrates on legal obligaton:
First, the Greek word translated as "law" is nomos. The nomoi include what we would think of as positve law, but the Greek word is more encompassing that ours. The nomoi include what we might call "deeply held and widely shared social (or community) norms." So the question of conflict between the positive law of Athens and Athenian social norms that establish a duty to family would have been a conflict internal to the nomoi rather than a conflict between law and morality.
Second, the ancient conception of morality was aretaic rather than deontological–that is, Plato’s Socrates would have been thinking of this conflict in virtue-theoretic terms.
Cool post by Barros!