Actually, Charles, the empirical evidence is that people do obey the law because it's the law, and especially if it is passed by procedures they find acceptable:
Why People Obey the Law: Experimental Evidence from the Provision of Public Goods Lars Feld (feld at wiwi.uni-marburg.de) Jean-Robert Tyran (Jean-Robert.Tyran at unisg.ch)
According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The results show that severe sanctions almost perfectly deter free-riding. However, people also obey law backed by mild sanctions if it is accepted in a referendum. We show that voting for mild law induces expectations of cooperation, and that people tend to obey the law if they expect many others to do so.
http://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_651.html
Why People Obey the Law Author: Tom R. Tyler Publisher: Yale University Press, © 1990
[Part One] Previous research suggests that citizens are interested in procedural justice but leaders emphasize an instrumental understanding. Leaders believe people obey laws because of the outcomes and therefore make laws and attach ever stiffer and more draconian penalties for breaking them. Citizens are not as much interested in outcomes as in the sense of fairness and equity they have in dealing with those who seek to make them comply with the law. The study reported here aimed at testing the conclusion that citizens are interested in procedural justice.
Parts Two and Three present the data from an initial random sample of 1,575 respondents to a telephone interview of about 25 minutes. A year later a random subset of 804 respondents were reinterviewed. The questionnaires used in both interviews are included in an appendix to the book. These chapters discuss the results in relationship to the concept of legitimacy of authority. When authority is viewed as legitimate, compliance to the law increases.
Part Four presents the results in terms of the concept of procedural justice. The data show a strong commitment to procedural justice on the part of the citizens. Part Five, Conclusions, states unequivocally that the normative issues matter. People understand their system of justice in terms unrelated to outcomes.
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume5/j5_2_br10.htm
> From: andie nachgeborenen
>
>
> -clip-
> Law is free standing if what
> makes a law legally legitimate, that is, binding
> because it is the law, is itself a legal fact
>
>
> ^^^
> CB: Now there's a legal sentence.
>
> ^^
>
> > ^^^^^
> CB: This is the reason that laws are legitimate to
> whom ? There are not a
> lot of people who think , "I must follow this law
> because it was passed by
> the best procedures humanly possible."
>
> Most people who have a personal conflict with a
> particular law applied to
> them,(i.e. who must do something that they don't
> want to do) comply with
> that law despite its adverse impact on their
> interests, because they think
> something bad is going to or is likely to happen to
> them, like going to jail
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