  This may seem like an easy question, for surely legal reasoning is simply reasoning about the law, or about how judges should decide cases. On closer inspection, however, our ease may evaporate, for both of these formulations are ambiguous, at least according to some ways of thinking about the law.  Some legal theorists regard the questions, ‘what is the law?’, and ‘how should judges decide cases?’ as distinct questions with distinct answers (see e.g. Hart 1994; Kelsen 1967; Raz 1979 &amp; 1994). That is to say, their accounts of law and their accounts of adjudication are not one and the same, and they contend that in settling disputes which come before them, the remit of judges is wider than merely trying to establish what the law is as regards the issues in the case at hand. In adjudication, such theorists claim, extra-legal considerations can come into play, and judges may have discretion to modify existing law or to fill in gaps where existing law is indeterminate. This being so, for some legal theorists, the first formulation above, that legal reasoning is reasoning about the law, is ambiguous between: (a) reasoning to establish the content of the law as it presently exists, and (b) reasoning from that content to the decision which a court should reach in a case which comes before it. 