Resistance to understanding legal interpretation as the search for a provision’s contribution to the content of the law may be due in some quarters to a tacit assumption that there is no clear line between searching for a provision’s contribution to the law and creating legal norms or finding ways of resolving disputes when there is no applicable first-order law. Although many lawyers and judges seem to be attracted to some version of this assumption, it’s not entirely clear how to make sense of it. On the face of it, the factors and decisions relevant to ascertaining the content of the law are very different from those relevant to fashioning legal norms or to deciding how to resolve disputes not controlled by legal norms.