People vary in the extent to which they generally feel obligated to obey the law. The Obligation to Obey the Law (OOL) plays a major role in how people respond to legal rules and whether they comply or violate such rules. Most existing research on OOL has been non-comparative. The present paper explores national differences in OOL by analyzing data from a survey conducted among a convenience sample (n = 716) of law students in the Netherlands, the US, Israel, and China. In contrast to what existing research on procedural justice and OOL would lead us to expect, the data do not reveal significant differences in OOL across markedly different national populations. It explores why no such differences have been found and what the implications of these findings are for our understanding of OOL and compliance more broadly.

There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This paper describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct captures the extent to which one thinks about rules in a rigid, rule-oriented manner or in a manner that recognizes exceptions. In the first study, we develop the Rule Orientation scale, demonstrate its convergent and divergent validity with key legal and moral reasoning scales, and find that Rule Orientation relates to hypothetical offending behavior across a variety of low-level crimes. In the second study, we examine whether Rule Orientation predicts the propensity to engage in digital piracy both with and without the explicit threat of punishment. The results indicate that Rule Orientation plays a crucial role in predicting offending behavior and, importantly, does so across enforcement contexts. The findings suggest that an individual with low Rule Orientation may be able to justify offending regardless of whether a system explicitly declares an enforcement campaign, regardless of how the individual perceives the severity of the threatened sanction, and regardless of whether the individual believes social norms support law violation. In understanding ethical decision-making, criminal decision-making, and other strands of legal decision-making, identifying such individual variation is crucial.

174 words) This paper offers a new approach to study the general duty to obey the law (GDOL) in comparative perspective. GDOL is crucial for those studying the authority of law and rule of law, as well as those studying compliance and ethical decision making in relation to the law. It conceptualizes and tests a new scale to measure GDOL in a sample of 717 law students from China, the USA, the Netherlands and Israel. The new construct has good internal and convergent validity. The data reveal that variation in GDOL across the four countries is limited, and China is not the expected outlier in the sample. GDOL varies with legal education, with less formal legal education related to a higher GDOL in the first year and to a lower GDOL in senior years. Also students with a higher altruistic orientation to study law reported higher GDOL. In conclusion, GDOL and the related authority of law may be not just a matter of national and institutional differences but also one of personal preferences and personality. Introduction Legal systems can only function well if there is voluntary compliance, and when there is no need to implement each and every rule through the threat of sanctions (cf. Tyler 1997). While of course such voluntary compliance is most easily developed for rules that people agree with, modern legal systems include many rules where widespread moral support may not be optimal. It is here that Tyler (1997) has argued that the general duty to obey the law is crucial. If people perceive that they have a duty to obey the law, simply because it is the law, regardless of circumstances, neither enforcement nor moral agreement with the law are necessary. Modern legal systems that govern large and heterogeneous jurisdictions with challenges both in terms of enforcement and moral agreement, therefore hinge upon the people’s perceptions about the general duty to obey the law.