Austin grounds legal obligation in habitual obedience to a sovereign plus sanction.
Evidence
In each political community, he thought, one will find a sovereign-a person or a determinate group whom the rest obey habitually, but who is not in the habit of obeying anyone else. The legal rules of a community are the general commands its sovereign has deployed. Austin’s definition of legal obligation followed from this definition of law. One has a legal obligation, he thought, if one is among the addressees of some general order of the sovereign, and is in danger of suffering a sanction unless he obeys that order. — Ronald M. Dworkin, The Model of Rules, 32
Categorization
- DEFINE: Spells out the sovereign/habitual-obedience/sanction structure that defines Austin’s legal obligation.
- XREF: connects to: Hart points out that [Austin’s view that every rule is a general command] obliterates the distinction between being obliged to do something and being obligated to do it. If one is bound by a rule he is obligated, not merely obliged, to do what it provides, and therefore being bound by a rule must be different from being subject to an injury if one disobeys an order.