Coercive enforcement and a positivist theory of legal obligation

Abstract

The concept of legal obligation is utterly central to legal practice. But positivism lacks a comprehensive account of legal obligation, focusing only on the second-order recognition obligations of officials with no account of the first-order legal obligations of citizen. As legal obligations are conceptually related to legally valid norms, this failure calls into question positivism’s theory of legal validity. In this essay, I develop Hart’s account of social obligation and supplement his account of the second-order legal obligations of official qua official with an account of the first-order obligations of citizens. The latter is constituted, I argue, by social pressure in the form of the authorization of the state’s coercive machinery for non-compliance.