The Obligation

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.

In The Obligation, 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 and evolution of obligation and duty, from Roman obligatio and the officia to their full juridification;
• the sources of public duties: general principles, international and EU law, the Constitution, statutes, regulations, contracts, self-regulation and soft law;
• the obligated persons and their status, including public authorities themselves;
• the cost of obligations: compliance costs, opportunity cost, compensation and the automation of duties;
• compliance and non-compliance: exemptions, objections, liabilities and penalties.

Its conclusions apply to any field in which the state imposes duties (taxation, labor, environmental and economic regulation) and will interest scholars of public law and legal theory, regulators, public officials and comparative lawyers.

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.

Ricardo Rivero Ortega is Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Salamanca, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Law (2012-2017) and Rector (2017-2024). Since 2025 he has presided over the International Institute of Administrative Law.