Do We Have Reasons to Obey the Law?

Abstract

Instead of the question, ‘Do we have an obligation to obey the law?,’ we should first ask the easier question, ‘Do we have reasons to obey the law?.’ This paper offers a new account of the notion of what Hart called the content-independence of legal reasons in terms of the normative grounding relation. That account is then used to mount a defense of the claim that we do indeed have content-independent, genuinely normative reasons to obey the law (because it is the law), and that these reasons do sometimes amount to an obligation to so-act.