  On the orthodox view (reflected in Hart 1994, and developed in its strongest form in Raz 1994), questions about the existence and content of legal rights and obligations are questions purely of institutional history. Legal rights and obligations are creatures of institutional action. Institutions that count as authoritative in a legal system create, modify, or extinguish a legal right or obligation primarily through communication (see e.g. Hart 1994 at 124). Institutional communication has its own logic. When an institution passes a statute or adopts a regulation, it must be understood to be conveying a norm (a standard that mandates or permits some action) or, more precisely, to be conveying the institution’s intention to create, by the act of conveying the intention, a norm with the stipulated content. From the perspective of the institution, such an act of communication always has the force of a binding order that subjects are meant to obey and brings into existence a binding norm, namely that subjects ought to take the stipulated action. The norms produced by institutional communication so understood (and possibly also the norms that institutions consider and tacitly endorse in their customary practices) are valid norms of the system and make up the entire content of the law. A legal right or obligation exists when and in virtue of the fact that a norm that is part of the law so understood confers or imposes it, therefore ultimately in virtue of the fact that some institution said so. On the orthodox view, it is a basic, conceptual truth about law that institutional action determines legal rights and obligations in this way.