This thesis investigates the normativity of law, addressing the question of how legal practices, by their nature, relate to the practical situation. It defends an inflationary approach to law’s normativity against two prominent deflationary challenges in contemporary jurisprudence. The first is Scott Hershovitz’s eliminativist deflationism, which denies the existence of distinct domains of legal content. The second is David Enoch’s triggering deflationism, which argues that legal practices do not create novel reasons for action but merely trigger pre-existing ones.

The thesis argues that both deflationary accounts fail. Hershovitz’s eliminativist deflationism cannot accommodate the existence conditions of legal practices as social-normative, artifactual kinds. Enoch’s triggering deflationism fails to account for the deontic, directional, and modally robust character of law’s authority.

In their place, the thesis develops and defends a pluralistic, conventional-role account of law’s normativity: the “Public Commitments Picture”. On this view, legal practices and their systems function as public repositories for a political community’s commitments to the terms under which its members live together. These commitments are expressed through multiple normative modes and realised through diverse legal forms (customary, legislated, and case law), each contributing distinctively to law’s core function.

Central to this account is the privileged role of legitimate authority, partly explained by the non-instrumental value of the authority-subject relationship. Legitimate authority, so understood, explains “pure” legal obligations that triggering accounts cannot. The Public Commitments Picture vindicates the importance of plurality in both legal form and institutional role. In addition, the Public Commitments Picture provides a framework for critiquing contemporary trends in Anglophone apex court jurisprudence that undervalue certain legal forms (like the common law) and legal roles (like the judiciary), thereby demonstrating the practical import of theoretical debates about law’s nature and normativity.