  Examination of (i) how one legal system becomes independent of another by lawful processes and (ii) how parts of a legal system (e.g., its constitution, or its rules for identifying office-holders) are replaced by the unlawful processes of coup d’état or revolution demonstrates (see Raz 1979, 100–109) that the identity of a subsisting legal system as one and the same system of legal norms cannot be explained (or even coherently described) by an account which refers only to the norms and their inter-relationships as validating norms and validated norms. The non-momentary identity of a legal system is a function of the subsisting identity of the community whose legal system it is. Legal theory is sub-alternated to the historical understanding (including self-understanding) of a community and its members as being this community—paradigmatically, this nation-state—rather than some accidental sequence or agglomeration of persons and events, and this understanding must be in some substantial measure non-dependent upon the legal norms that the community may succeed in constituting for itself and its members. Doubtless the shared purpose of living together under a rule of law, and the shared memory of a shared acknowledgment or recognition of such laws as our laws, are normally important components of such a shared understanding of political-communal and legal identity. But other shared purposes, memories and dispositions to act must be also be substantially present, if the phenomena of lawful independence and revolutionary constitutional change are to be as they are.