  The following discussion attempts to explore some of these issues concerning whether and why considerations of coherence have an important role to play in understanding law. As this entry seeks to illuminate the role of coherence in legal reasoning, the emphasis here is on coherence accounts of adjudication, and on examining the role which coherence plays in courts' reasoning about how to decide cases according to law. This being so, this part of the entry discusses legal reasoning in the sense outlined in formulation (b) in Section 1 ("What Do Legal Theorists Mean By ‘Legal Reasoning’?"), i.e. reasoning from the content of the existing law on a given issue to the decision which a court should reach in a case involving that issue which comes before it.