ABSTRACT
Professor Ladd has made a genuine contribution to legal philosophy by raising the question of the appropriateness of the concept of obligation as an explanation of obedience to law and by effectively demonstrating in the detail of his argument the inadequacy of the narrow sense of that concept. The narrow concept of obligation is drawn primarily from the area of commutative justice, the one-to-one relationship which characterizes contractual arrangements, and the further it is extended from this core meaning, the less adequately it can explain normative conduct. Professor Ladd's new approach to law and morals is characterized by his strong feeling against the opaqueness and totalism of obligations as a suitable model for the legal order. The author believes that he has overstated the importance of particular decrees and rules in contrast to the value of the whole system.
