The Obligation

About this work

Rights fill the textbooks. Duties run our lives. Taxes, reporting requirements, inspections, compliance programs, civic duties: the modern state governs above all by imposing obligations. Yet while legal scholarship has built an elaborate theory of rights, the public duty has been left almost untheorized, and the person who must comply is often left without basic guarantees.

Ricardo Rivero Ortega sets out a complete general theory of positive public duties from the standpoint of administrative law. Why do we obey the law? What turns a moral or political demand into a binding legal duty? What limits must the legislature and the administration respect when they impose one? The book covers the origin of obligation and duty, from Roman obligatio and the officia to their full juridification; the sources of public duties, from international and EU law to the Constitution, statutes, regulations, contracts, self-regulation and soft law; the obligated persons and their status, including public authorities themselves; the cost of obligations; and compliance and non-compliance, with exemptions, objections, liabilities and penalties.

Translated from the Spanish original, La obligación. Concepto y régimen jurídico de los deberes públicos, published by the Spanish Official State Gazette (BOE) in 2025.

Who it is for. For scholars of public law and legal theory, regulators, public officials and comparative lawyers. Its conclusions apply to any field in which the state imposes duties: taxation, labor, environmental and economic regulation.