A Theory of Legal Obligation

Stefano Bertea is a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft research fellow at the Goethe Universität and an Associate Professor at the University of Leicester. Previously, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, a visiting research fellow at the Am Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht, Germany, an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, a senior research fellow at the Universiteit Antwerpen, a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi di Verona and at the Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, and a visiting researcher at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Introduction; 1. The concept of obligation; 2. Contemporary approaches to legal obligations: a preliminary map; 3. The social-practice account; 4. The interpretivist account; 5. The conventionalist reason account; 6. The exclusionary reason account; 7. A revisionary Kantian conception; 8. Further dimensions of the revisionary Kantian conception; 9. The robust reason account; 10. The method of presuppositional interpretation; Conclusion.