ABSTRACT
In this contribution Margaret Martin is concerned with the question: do we have an obligation to obey the law? By means of a critical reading of Plato’s Crito, Martin claims that the obligation to obey the law is contingent on the quality of the political society, of which legal institutions are but one part. Accordingly, for Martin, Plato’s account of the obligation to obey the law resists all the clean categories that tend to structure the debate about our legal obligations. She then suggests that the social contract justification of the obligation to obey offered by Plato must be read in the context of the unfolding drama, and not as a set of propositions devoid of context. That is, the version of the social contract justification of the obligation to obey the law put forward by Plato partially reflects certain truths about Athens. The ultimate reasons for legal obedience that in Crito Plato offers are therefore grounded in the assumption that the legal system under consideration—Athens’s—is morally worthy.
