  These considerations may also seem to speak mainly to the issue of how we are to go about interpreting aspects of the law. However, the reasons why it is important to pay attention to the intentions of law-making institutions when we interpret the law also furnish us with Raz's answer to the question of why legal reasoning is interpretive at all. We pay attention to the intentions of law-making institutions because it is important to establish which legal rules those institutions have laid down, and what they mean. In turn, it is important to establish the existence and meaning of legal rules laid down by law-making institutions because of law's purportedly authoritative nature. For Raz, legal institutions claim to express binding and authoritative judgements regarding what ought to be done which are designed to allow people to better conform to reason if they follow the decisions of the authority than if they try to follow those other reasons which apply to them directly (see Raz 1994, ch.10). In deciding cases according to law, then, we have a responsibility to try to establish the existence and meaning of any purportedly authoritatively binding legal rules which have a bearing on the situation under consideration, and we do so by interpreting the decisions of law-making institutions in a way which accords with the intentions of those institutions in making the decisions in question. For Raz, then, it is the authoritative nature of law which explains why legal reasoning is interpretive, whereas, for example, moral reasoning is not. Law, unlike morality, stems from social sources (on the role of social sources in understanding law, see Raz 1979 and the entry on  legal positivism),  from institutions issuing purportedly authoritative directives which claim to express a binding judgement about what ought to be done. Part of our task in reasoning about the law is thus to establish the existence and meaning of those directives, and, in order to do so, we must interpret the decisions of law-making institutions in accordance with the intentions of the law-makers in order to try to establish the content and meaning of the law which they intended to make (see also Raz 1996a and 1996b).