 It is an important feature of Hart’s account that the rule of recognition is an official custom, and not a standard necessarily shared by the broader community. If the imperativalists’ picture of the political system was pyramidal power, Hart’s is more like Weber’s rational bureaucracy. Law is normally a technical enterprise, characterized by a division of labor. Ordinary subjects’ contribution to the existence of law may therefore amount to no more than passive compliance, and in an extreme case perhaps less than this. Thus, Hart’s necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a legal system are that 