 Reason-Giving and the Law David Enoch 1. Introduction A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps jurisprudes more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law 1 . But law is at least partially a social matter, its content at least partially determined by social practices. And how can something social and descriptive in this down-to-earth kind of way be normative? 2 This is presumably a problem for any theory of law, but it is especially acute for legal positivism, according to which (roughly speaking) all there is to facts about legality are such descriptive social facts. If this is so, the thought goes, the task of accommodating the law's normativity immediately becomes both more daunting, and more urgent 3 . Unfortunately, though, it is entirely unclear what the problem of the normativity of law is supposed to be. Indeed, I suspect that there is no one problem here, as different people seem to have in mind different problems when they use this unhelpful phrase 4 . At least one family of issues people seem to have in mind when 1 For instance: "An attempt to explain this normative, reason-giving aspect of law is one of the main challenges of general jurisprudence." (Marmor, 2008); "The Normativity Thesis: …We understand law only if we understand how it is that laws give members of a community, officials and law-subjects alike, reasons for acting." (Postema, 1982, 165) And Coleman's (2001) title for the relevant part of his book is "The Possibility of the Normativity of Law". In one place Hart (1982, 262) writes about the need to explain "the 'normativity' of law", scare-quoting the word "normativity". Could it be that he too thought it was a spectre? 2 For the suspicion that this is a form of alchemy, see Hart (1958, 86) and the reference there. 3 For example: "another important question arises here: how can a conventional practice give rise to reasons for action and, in particular, to obligations?" (Marmor, 2008); "How could the sheer fact that someone said that p or ordered that p ever validate a norm?" (Green, 1999, 35). And I think something like this problem is the central problem Coleman attempts to solve in his (2001, Lecture 7). 4 Marmor (2001, 25) expresses a similar suspicion.