ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the operation of legal rights in protecting individual well-being is itself highly reliant on the fulfilment of multiple kinds of obligations. It analyses the ways in which needs and obligations together find an articulation in the language of solidarity. It is a commonplace in legal analysis to observe that there is a necessary correlation between legal rights and obligations: that each right has a corresponding obligation and therefore that there is a constant and direct relation between particular rights and obligations. There is then a politics to the identification of and responses to what obligations a community has not just in terms of material needs but those of the cultural and communal needs required for individual and collective flourishing. At the state level a key expression of joint liability can be found in the fiscal system, where the legal obligation to pay taxes instantiates a sense of solidarity as a matter of distributive justice.
