How the Law Guides

The concept of guidance lies at the heart of normativity. It follows, according to the common view that the law necessarily claims to be normative, that guidance must play a central role in understanding the law. This article focuses on two questions about guidance: (i) what distinguishes normative guidance from non-normative guidance; and (ii) what is involved in using something as a reason and as a norm so that we are normatively guided by that something. In doing so, two features of how the law guides emerge: first, that despite the involvement of reasons, our relationship with the law is sometimes better characterised as non-normative guidance rather than normative guidance; and second, that it is a conceptual feature of what it is to use a legal directive as a norm that further practical reasoning is required to figure out what action that directive requires, independently of that directive’s vagueness or indeterminacy.