 It is doubtful that evidence of a person’s character and past behaviour can have no probabilistic bearing on his behaviour on a particular occasion; on a probabilistic conception of relevance, it is difficult to see why the evidence is not relevant. Even so, there may be policy, moral or other reasons for the law to prohibit certain uses of character evidence. In declaring a fact as irrelevant for a particular purpose, we are not necessarily saying or implying anything about probability. We may be expressing a normative judgment. For policy, moral or other reasons, the law takes the position that hearsay or the accused’s character or previous misconduct must not be used as the premise for a particular line of reasoning. The line of reasoning might be morally objectionable (“give a dog a bad name and hang him for it”) or it might be unfair to permit the drawing of the inference when the opponent was not given a fair opportunity to challenge it (as in the hearsay situation) (Ho 2008: chs. 5, 6). If we take a normative conception of relevance instead of a logical or probabilistic one, it is not an abuse of language to describe inadmissible evidence as irrelevant if what is meant is that the evidence ought not to be taken into account in a certain way.