  In this operation, the principles (and the further norms that they determine) are valid in virtue of the relation of justification they bear to the original norms. In the presently relevant sense of justification, an eligible principle is one that reflects an ideal arrangement, prescinding from institutional practice, against which norms that the practice produced are measured, provided the principle is at least logically consistent with the norms. Consider principles that set out the morally right way to identify and deal with private wrongs, setting aside the actual practice of institutions in that area. Such principles would be germane to the project of designing institutions of tort from scratch or of reforming existing ones. But for some principles to be said to justify some actual, institutionally created, norms of tort, as the hybrid interpretivist says his favoured principles do, it wouldn’t be enough that the principles captured the relevant ideals. They would further need to be at least consistent, in some specified sense, with the norms. A principle wouldn’t count as justifying an institutionally created norm in any sense, when it prohibited what the norm required or permitted. For any putative set of justifying principles, it’s a condition of eligibility additional to and independent of merit that the principles be consistent, in some specified sense, with the set of the original norms.