Still, before we spell out those properties, a word or two must be said about premise (2). Is it really true that law claims authority? Raz argues about this at length, suggesting that it is an essential property of law to claim authority. He also talks about what it means to say that law claims authority. He notes that one could say that anything claims authority if one wished, but that would be silly in many instances. The key thing about law is that, because it issues action-guiding directives, it makes sense to say that it claims authority. Things would be different if law were to consist entirely of propositions about volcanoes (Raz’s example), but it doesn’t. It consists of action-guiding directives. That’s not to say that the law never fails to successfully or legitimately claim authority — that’s a different claim — but it is to say that law can be intelligibly characterised as claiming authority.