 Dworkin’s resort to fantasy, however, raises questions. Critics of a Razian persuasion will claim that an appeal to a fantasy court is necessitated only by Dworkin’s adoption of an unduly restrictive conception of legitimacy centred on the judicial enforcement of law. But the essence of legitimate authority is the existence of a content-independent obligation of obedience, not the subsidiary question of whether it is properly enforceable, let alone enforceable through the courts. Another difficulty is that it seems problematic to derive obligations to obey international law here and now on the basis of a fantasy scenario that bears little relation to any existing, or reasonably foreseeable, reality. For example, why should the fact that there is plausibly an obligation to obey the International Criminal Court in a hypothetical world in which it operates impartially and effectively tell us anything much about states’ obligations in the current world in which its impartiality and effectiveness are matters of heated controversy? At a more methodological level, many will baulk at Dworkin’s tendency to run together the question of the existence of international law with that of its legitimacy, since they would reject his thesis that law is of its nature presumptively legitimate (Tasioulas 2021). For some other treatments of the legitimacy of international law, see Besson, Christiano, and Pettit in Besson and Tasioulas (2010); also regarding particular institutions, such as courts Føllesdal 1998)).