 That argument, you might say, should not be overgeneralised, for not all legislation is like the Value Added Tax. Just as it is possible to make law by the use of language, it is also possible to fail to do so: when the would-be lawmaker has no authority, or when the law deprives the act of lawmaking effect because of a defect in the substance or the process of the action of the would-be lawmaker, or when the law confers on another agency the power to override or to change the law made by the lawmaker. And it is possible for the law made by a legislature or by the framers of a constitution to be morphed out of all recognition by a pattern of judicial acts that change its effect, even if the courts and all the lawyers describe the courts’ role all along as ‘interpretation’. Moreover, in some circumstances and for some purposes there is something to Ronald Dworkin’s picture of a judge in the United States as ‘a partner continuing to develop, in what he believes is the best way, the statutory scheme Congress began’ (Dworkin 1986b, 313). For legislation can create a scheme of regulation that cries out for elaboration in the course of the judicial resolution of disputes over its operation. But that work of reasoned elaboration is only an occasional aspect of a role in which a judge may be bound by a legislative decision, where the law allocates a power of lawful decision to the legislature.