Why Should We Obey The Law

Whether we should obey the law is a question that affects everyone’s day-to-day life, from traffic laws to taxes. Most people obey out of habit, but the question remains: why are we morally required to do so? If we fail to obey, the state may enforce compliance, but is it right for it to do this, and if so, why? In this book, George Klosko, a renowned authority on political obligation, skillfully probes these questions. He considers various prominent theories of obligation and shows why they are unconvincing, contending that only an approach that interweaves multiple principles, rooted in "fair play," is fully persuasive. Klosko develops the fullest statement of his own well-known theory of political obligation while providing a clear overview of the subject. The result is both an essential introductory text for students of political theory and philosophy and a cutting-edge, original contribution to the debate.

People obey the law if they believe it's legitimate, not because they fear punishment--this is the startling conclusion of Tom Tyler's classic study. Tyler suggests that lawmakers and law enforcers would do much better to make legal systems worthy of respect than to try to instill fear of punishment. He finds that people obey law primarily because they believe in respecting legitimate authority. In his fascinating new afterword, Tyler brings his book up to date by reporting on new research into the relative importance of legal legitimacy and deterrence, and reflects on changes in his own thinking since his book was first published.

The central question in political philosophy is whether political states have the right to coerce their constituents and whether citizens have a moral duty to obey the commands of their state. In this 2005 book, Christopher Heath Wellman and A. John Simmons defend opposing answers to this question. Wellman bases his argument on samaritan obligations to perform easy rescues, arguing that each of us has a moral duty to obey the law as his or her fair share of the communal samaritan chore of rescuing our compatriots from the perils of the state of nature. Simmons counters that this, and all other attempts to explain our duty to obey the law, fail. He defends a position of philosophical anarchism, the view that no existing state is legitimate and that there is no strong moral presumption in favor of obedience to, or compliance with, any existing state.

When asked why people obey the law, legal scholars usually give two answers. Law deters illicit activities by specifying sanctions, and it possesses legitimate authority in the eyes of society. Richard McAdams shifts the prism on this familiar question to offer another compelling explanation of how the law creates compliance: through its expressive power to coordinate our behavior and inform our beliefs. “McAdams’s account is useful, powerful, and—a rarity in legal theory—concrete...McAdams’s treatment reveals important insights into how rational agents reason and interact both with one another and with the law. The Expressive Powers of Law is a valuable contribution to our understanding of these interactions.” —Harvard Law Review “McAdams’s analysis widening the perspective of our understanding of why people comply with the law should be welcomed by those interested either in the nature of law, the function of law, or both...McAdams shows how law sometimes works by a power of suggestion. His varied examples are fascinating for their capacity both to demonstrate and to show the limits of law’s expressive power.” —Patrick McKinley Brennan, Review of Metaphysics

The question, 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. The thought that there is no such duty poses a challenge to our ordinary understanding of political authority and its legitimacy. In what sense can political officials have a right to rule us if there is no duty to obey the laws they lay down? Some thinkers, concluding that a general duty to obey the law cannot be defended, have gone so far as to embrace philosophical anarchism, the view that the state is necessarily illegitimate. Others argue that the duty to obey the law can be grounded on the idea of consent, or on fairness, or on other ideas, such as community.

"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--

This book explains the original meaning of the two religion clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law [1] respecting an establishment of religion or [2] prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As the book shows, both clauses were intended to protect the free exercise of religion or religious freedom. West shows the position taken by early Americans on four issues: (1) the general meaning of the “free exercise of religion,” including whether it is different from the meaning of “no establishment of religion”; (2) whether the free exercise of religion may be intentionally and directly limited, and if so, under what circumstances; (3) whether laws regulating temporal matters that also have a religious sanction violate the free exercise of religion; and (4) whether the free exercise of religion gives persons a right to be exempt from obeying valid civil laws that unintentionally and indirectly make it difficult or impossible to practice their religion in some way. A definitive work on the subject and a major contribution to the field of constitutional law and history, this volume is key to a better understanding of the ongoing constitutional adjudication based on the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

This book is the culmination of over 15 years of research on terrorism, secession, and related concepts such as the obligation to obey the law, pacifism, civil disobedience, non-violent direct action, political violence, revolution, and assassination. It is sincerely hoped that the content of this book is construed as an ethical and philosophical attempt to advance human understanding of some of life’s most intractable problems, namely, terrorism and more generally, political violence. This book is proffered as a propadeutic to further study of these issues and is not to be interpreted as the author’s final word on them. For the pursuit of truth and avoidance of error is never wholly complete, but at best a life-long process of continual reflection, analysis and argument. And it will please the author of this book if it brings even a modicum of knowledge to the difficulties it investigates. Some of the chapters of this book have been published or have otherwise experienced the critical assistance of various public academic forums, and I am sincerely grateful to those who have shaped my thinking about terrorism and its related concepts. Among those who have provided critical and helpful insights concerning various sections of the contents of this book are: David Copp, Richard Falk, Joel Feinberg, Richard W. Miller, and Thomas Pogge.