Book Review: Obligations: New Trajectories in Law
| Author | Jia Liu |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221099607 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
SCOTT VEITCH, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law. London; New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 132,
ISBN 9780367345983.
Obligations: New Trajectories in Law offers us illuminating insights into the role of obli-
gation in contemporary legal and social practices. The book aims to question and correct
the predominant image of rights and rights culture in liberal capitalism. Veitch gives
prominence to obligations by probing into how the notion of obligation has appeared, dis-
appeared, and formed obligation-obedience hybrids in contemporary legal and social
practices. His keen observations draw our attention to not only the operation of obliga-
tions but how obligations sustain prevalent patterns of inequalities in contemporary soci-
eties. It stimulates thinking and reflection on a range of urgent issues in contemporary
legal and social practices, in particular, what the role is played by law in creating obliga-
tions in the digital age.
Veitch’s analysis starts with observations on the priority of obligation in a range of
social and political practices. He exhibits how obligations, instead of rights, establish
trust in a broad range of social life, such as family, friendships, intimate relations, etc.
In these relationships, rights do not give true meaning to the social practices, whereas
obligations play a key role in sustaining the integrity of the social practices, in particular,
in defending it from the corrosive effect of some other logic, such as utility maximization,
monetary value, etc (pp. 15–16).
Veitch then devotes two chapters to tracing the profound influence of the priority of
obligation upon legal thinking and practice. In Chapter II, he observes that the
obligation-obedience hybrids played a dominant role in official and private practices
under the influence of the Protestant Reformation. Veitch invites us to pay attention to
Viscount Stair, the founding person of the Scots Law. Scots established a Calvinist
trio of “Obedience, Freedom and Engagement”; and, “freedom is located between two
sets of obligation—‘obediential’and those created by human engagement”(emphasis
in original, p. 32). The priority of obligation finds its place where obediential obligations
“formed the grounding for conventional obligations, which together formed the weave of
duties, loyalties, and in turn the freedoms and rights that social life demanded and
offered”(p. 34). Thus, Veitch observes that what grounded human relations was the pri-
ority of obligations, rather than the right to rights as William Galbraith and Hannah
Arendt described.
Veitch notes in the third chapter that the discourse of rights gained prominence in
modern society. The development of rights relied on the generation of constraints
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(6) 961–972
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639221099607
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