  Once a stance has been taken on the nature of the coherence relation in the case of law, many further questions concerning the role which considerations of coherence are to play in legal reasoning come to the fore. One important issue is that of how much emphasis is to be placed on coherence in justifying a judicial decision. Is exhibiting some degree of coherence with the existing law a necessary requirement of any justified judicial decision? Is it both a necessary and sufficient requirement, such that an account of the role of coherence in adjudication supplies us with a complete explanation of how judges should decide cases according to law? Or is coherence rather to be regarded as a desirable feature of judicial decision making, but one which can be overridden by other considerations in certain circumstances? 