Socrates and Legal Obligation was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Charged with "impiety" and sentenced to death under the law of Athens, Socrates did not try to disprove the charges or to escape death, but rather held to a different kind of rhetoric, aiming not at persuasion but at truth. In Socrates and Legal Obligation, R.E. Allen contends that Plato's works on Socrates' acceptance of death—the Apology and the Crito — should be considered together and as such constitute a profound treatment of law and of obligation to law. Allen's study of Socrates' thought on these vital issues is accompanied by his own translations of the Apology and the Crito.

This book focuses upon the perennial question of the existence and nature of an obligation to obey the law. Leading writers have, at one time or another, emphasized considerations such as gratitude, 'divine ordering, ' prudence, contract, autonomy, and utility in seeking to justify, or to deny any justification for, some sort of obligation to obey the positive law. The book provides relevant selections from a sampling of the historical approaches to legal obligation taken by writers such as Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Thoreau, Bentham, Marx and Engels, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These classical discussions are augmented by critical questions and commentary, by independent discussions of the question of legal obligation by a wide range of contemporary writers, and by relevant judicial cases discussing matters such as conscientious objection and civil disobedience.

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 fresh outlook on Socrates' political philosophy in Plato's early dialogues argues that it is both more subtle and less authoritarian than has been supposed. Focusing on the Crito, Richard Kraut shows that Plato explains Socrates' refusal to escape from jail and his acceptance of the death penalty as arising not from a philosophy that requires blind obedience to every legal command but from a highly balanced compromise between the state and the citizen. In addition, Professor Kraut contends that our contemporary notions of civil disobedience and generalization arguments are not present in this dialogue.

In this work, the author contends that contrary to prevailing notions, Plato's 'Crito' does not show an allegiance between Socrates & the state that condemned him. Weiss brings to light numerous indications that Socrates & the Laws are not partners.

This audacious collection of modern writings on Plato and the Law argues that Plato's work offers insights for resolving modern jurisprudential problems. Plato's dialogues, in this modern interpretation, reveal that knowledge of the functions of law, based upon intelligible principles, can be reformulated for relevance to our age. Leading interpreters of Plato: Vlastos, Hall, Strauss, Weinrib, Annas, and Morrow, are included in the collection. The editor supplies an insightful introduction and extensive bibiography to the collection.

The aim of the book is to make Socrates' investigation and resolution of the questions that still concern us as human beings more accessible to serious contemporary readers.

A compelling set of lectures on political obligation that contributes to ongoing debates in political theory and intellectual history This stimulating collection of lectures by the late Judith Shklar on political obligation is paired with a scholarly introduction that offers an overview of her life, illuminates the connections among her teaching, research, and publications, and explains why her lectures still resonate with us and contribute to current debates in political theory and intellectual history.

'Statelessness' is a legal status denoting lack of any nationality, a status whereby the otherwise normal link between an individual and a state is absent. The increasingly widespread problem of statelessness has profound legal, social, economic and psychological consequences but also gives rise to the paradox of an international community that claims universal standards for all natural persons while allowing its member states to allow statelessness to occur. In this powerfully argued book, Conklin critically evaluates traditional efforts to recognize and reduce statelessness. The problem, he argues, rests in the obligatory nature of law, domestic or international. By closely analysing a broad spectrum of court and tribunal judgments from many jurisdictions, Conklin explains how confusion has arisen between two discourses, the one discourse inside the other, as to the nature of the international community. One discourse, a surface discourse, describes a community in which international law justifies a state's freedom to confer, withdraw or withhold nationality. This international community incorporates state freedom over nationality matters, bringing about the de jure and effective stateless condition. The other discourse, an inner discourse, highlights a legal bond of socially experienced relationships. Such a bond, judicially referred to as 'effective nationality', is binding upon all states, and where such a bond exists, harm to a stateless person represents harm to the international community as a whole.

Non-violent movements, under figures like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, led to some of the great social changes of the 20th century, and some argue it offers solutions for this century's problems. This book explores non-violence from its roots in diverse religious and philosophical traditions to its role in bringing social and political change today.