has standing as an individual to demand that others provide her, along with authority to hold them accountable. What she has a moral liberty right to do is what others have no authority to demand that she not do.' Moral rights thus also involve the moral law. If I have a moral liberty to do A, then I do no wrong in doing A; that is, I do nothing that members of the moral community have, as such, the authority to demand I not do. I do not violate the moral law, understood as what members can demand of one another. And if I have a moral claim, as an individual, to your doing A, then the moral law gives me special standing as an individual to demand that you do A and to hold you accountable if you do not. For example, I could demand that you compensate my injury, release you from compensation, or, even, forgive you for injuring me. This is a standing I have, not as a representative of the moral community authorized to hold one another responsible for moral wrongs in general, but as an individual involved in the transaction. The authority that is involved in moral obligations and rights is moral authority-as I see it, the authority of members of the moral community to make claims and demands of other members of the community. But the notions of authority, obligations, rights, and responsibility are also all obviously central to law (that is, to laws legislated, administered, and enforced by those with legal authority). Laws create legal obligations and rights, and the authority to hold responsible is essential both to the criminal and the civil law. Laws are not simply standards that assess conduct in some specific way; laws are promulgated, that is addressed, to those who are subject to them. They make putatively authoritative demands with which addressed subjects are responsible for complying. Legal sanctions are not just coercive threats, even justified ones. They involve an exercise of putatively legitimate authority that purports to give reasons for compliance that cannot be reduced to the desire to avoid some evil in which the sanction consists, or even to avoid a justified evil. As Hart famously put it, laws purport to obligate rather than only oblige.' However unwelcome or restrictive sanctions may be, there is a fundamental conceptual difference 4.
