  Levenbook 1984 contends that it is a necessary condition for a judicial decision to be legally justified that it coheres with some part of the established law. She contrasts her understanding of this requirement with that adopted by MacCormick 1978. According to Levenbook, while MacCormick also holds that minimal coherence with some part of the established law is a necessary condition of a judicial decision being justified, he nevertheless contends that, so long as this minimal standard is met, further considerations of coherence which are also relevant to the decision can be defeated on consequentialist grounds. Levenbook's view is that this approach gives coherence too modest a role to play in legal reasoning; once a very minimal requirement of coherence is met, this value is too easily defeasible by other considerations. Levenbook finds this account of adjudication troubling because, in her view, it fails to do justice to judges' responsibility to be faithful to pre-existing law, a responsibility which places the judiciary in a quite different situation from the legislature when it comes to the question of how law ought to be developed. She contends that a judge who, within the limits allowed to him by the law, adopts a decision which is better on moral grounds over one which displays greater congruence with the trend or spirit of the existing law has made a mistake, and has adopted a legally unjustified decision. Levenbook very succinctly focuses the dilemma which judges must confront in deciding how much weight is to be placed on considerations of coherence in judicial decisions: should judges always adopt the outcome to a case which best coheres with the pre-existing law, or can they ever be justified in adopting an outcome which is less coherent but morally preferable? This way of focusing the dilemma which judges may face brings out another important aspect of coherence in legal reasoning, namely that granting a strong role to considerations of coherence is to place considerable emphasis on the backward-looking aspect of adjudication, as such an approach may require judges to place greater value on adhering to what has gone before, rather than on doing what would otherwise, on moral grounds, be the right thing.