| Backed by the coercible force of the state, the law sets the standards of actions and sanctions unlawful actions, so it makes many of human actions not optional but obligated. Whether because of sanction or threat of sanction, or because of obligation, even because of convenience of action, law should be abided by. However, this abidance may not only result from one’s consciousness to his obligation, but also from the threat he feels. When the obedience to law is mainly due to threat, society will be torn into two oppositional camps, and the law will become the instrument of tyranny and enslavement. It will be a misery world that we should do our best to avoid. As H.L.A. Hart has found in his book, the existence of modern legal system per se is a risk, that is to say, the centralized power can be inflicted on a lot of people against their will unparallelly in history. Therefore, the most important task for theorists is how to find a way to keep a desirable balance between the social order and citizens’ freedom. This is a task of domesticating law.Through reviewing Hart’s rule theory by comparison with Austin’s command theory, this article accounts for why a rule can generate real obligations but an order or command cannot. The secret lies in the fact that a rule has its internal point. That is to say, if we have the reflective internal attitudes to the rule, our conformance to the law will imply the acceptance of law, not obedience merely.Legal phenomena have three typical characteristics, i.e. normative, coercible and official. The normative character shows that law is a body consisting of rules, and it is the fundamental element of law. What Hart had done is to whittle the coercion of law, which is the first step of domesticating law, but he failed to complete the whole enterprise. To finish this work, this article presents the internal-generated rule theory, attempting to bridge the gap between“being threatened”and“having the obligation”. Namely, the mission of this article is to explore the legal metaproposition of why to obey the law through discussing the reasons to obey the law. The internal-generated rule theory is also a combination of certain traditional Chinese thoughts with Hart’s theory of legal rule and Habermas’ theory of communicative action. |
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