  But the interpreter can’t reasonably hope that his work will always be so easy. Even assuming a fairly decent institutional history, the set of norms that would form the baseline would be the product of political action taken by different agents at different times, with a variety of motives and facing different political and other constraints in their choices (Raz 1994). The norms produced might conflict in their justification, some consistent with one scheme but indefensible under another. There might be no scheme of independently appealing principles—certainly not a perfectly just and otherwise compelling scheme—consistent with all the norms without exception. If the baseline included a norm that couldn’t be justified by his favored scheme of principle, the interpreter might have to try a different, less than perfect scheme, under which the problematic norm might be subsumed, and trade merit for consistency. But even if he were willing to accept a measure of imperfection in a scheme’s appeal, he might fail to find any eligible scheme, in which case he would have to reject the norm. Of course, if the communicated norms were to function as a fundamental, pre-interpretive constraint, rejection would have to be rare and subject to special justification. Only something about the remaining institutional norms—that they all cohered with a given set of principles—could allow the interpreter to reject the outlier.