  This is not the discredited claim that what it is for a legal obligation to take some action to exist is for some sanction to be attached to not taking the action, or that a coercive clause must of necessity be attached to every law. Rather, it is the claim that putative rights and obligations may be enforced through the institutions of government only when and because they bear a certain relation to the institutions’ practice. This is a normative constraint that is not dependent on whether occasion for enforcement ever arises. It is closer to Kelsen’s view that legality is at bottom a boundary separating permissible coercion exercised in the name of the community and impermissible coercion not so exercised (though of course for Kelsen this would be a moral boundary that only need exist in the eyes of the law, whether or not it exists outright; see Kelsen 1952).