ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the particular characteristics of legal obligations and what they contribute to the ecology of obligations. Obligations in law then are legal ties between persons that describe what actions, in law, are required or necessary to be performed by the one bound by them. The reciprocity between legal personality and obligation highlights that identity and constraint are mutually related through the legal definition of a multiplicity of roles. Legal obligations function in an environment made up of various institutions and social formations that may be described as constituting the ecology of obligations. The “ecology of obligations” concerns the conditions or techniques that obligations themselves provide for practices or modes of organisation or regulation. In this ecology, hybrids of obligation and obedience are an essential part of how legal obligations work. Obligations, including legal obligations, do their work through relying on the conditions that make social action and communication in modern societies possible.
