Legal obligation as the legal value

The article describes some aspects of understanding legal values and legal obligations in modern legal science.To achieve the goal of the study, the author envisaged the performing such tasks as: clarifying the understanding of legal valuesand legal obligations used by legal science; proving the possibility of recognizing a legal obligation as a legal value; formulation of theconcept of legal obligation as a legal value.The author traces the interrelation between legal values and the legal order, emphasizing that without legal values, the rule of lawis ineffective, in turn, – legal values outside the legal order have no practical content.Based on this, the author proposes his own definition of the concept of legal values as ideal legal entities and principles that determinea person’s perception of the importance of law, assessment of phenomena occurring in society through law, form a certain modelof legal person’s behavior and are designed to ensure legal order and discipline in society.Given this understanding of legal values, as well as the position of modern legal science on the essence of legal obligation, theauthor defines the concept of legal obligation as a legal value: this is a legal prescription which is formulated by the state as necessaryto ensure law and order model of individual behavior, established in order to maintain the proper functioning of society as a collectivewhole and to ensure the interests of all its members, and fulfilled on the basis of the perception of certain behavior as fair and sociallyappropriate. The author’s approach to the justification of a legal obligation as a legal value is proposed due to the following factors: theperson’s perception of the relevant behavior as necessary, fair, socially acceptable, which expresses a socially significant benchmark;the formulation by the state through the legal norm the socially significant behavior; realization through such behavior the human socialnature as a part of the collective whole; the implementation of the principle of interdependence and complementarity of the rights andobligations of the individual.