On the Issue of the Problems of Legal Obligation in the Welfare State in the Context of a Pandemic

The purpose of this article is to consider the theory of legal obligation through the prism of modern problems of building a social legal state. The article uses the following research methods: theoretical analysis, generalization, abstraction, formal legal and comparative legal. The author of the article notes the connection between legal obligation and social obligation and with public law, with social responsibility and state coercion, with the absolute imperative of power. The results of the study are the determination by its author of the determinants of the destruction of the nature of legal obligation; it is shown that the rule of law, which is not social, is not able to provide its citizens with protection and guarantees of their rights and freedoms. The main conclusions of the study are that the welfare state is a jurisdictionally separate legal space of rights and obligations, where public obligations must be balanced by the subjective rights of citizens; and it is also substantiated that the legal obligation plays the role, on the one hand, of a kind of «restrictive barrier» that delimits civil relations from other relations that operate with imperative methods and apply state coercion under the guise of a legal obligation, but on the other hand, it sets the permissible boundaries for the exercise of independent expression of will citizens.