 Joseph Raz rejected Hart’s claim that normative terms have a distinctive meaning in statements of law. In Raz’s view, to make a normative statement such as ‘you must stop at a red light’ is to imply that you have a certain sort of reason for action. If it is a statement applying the law, it implies that you have reason to stop from the point of view of the law. Raz’s theory of law, unlike Hart’s, is part of a theory of practical reason in general, and his account of normative statements treats them as having the same meaning in law and in morality. Hart initially thought that that approach would necessarily lead to an extreme sort of natural law theory, in which every true statement of law is necessarily a true moral statement, and every valid legal obligation is necessarily a moral obligation. But Raz resolved that concern of Hart’s, by pointing out that normative statements can be made in a detached way. People can make them without endorsing the point of view from which the reasons they are stating are valid (see Raz 1990, 175–177). Still, Hart did not accept Raz’s approach, which he felt created a certain sort of conceptual connection between law and morality. In responding to Raz, he insisted that ‘statements of the subject’s legal duties need have nothing directly to do with the subject’s reasons for action’ (Hart 1982, 267). And in an interview with the Spanish journal Doxa near the end of his career he maintained ‘that legal and moral obligation are conceptually different’, so that a statement of obligation has a different meaning in law and in morality (De Paramo 1988). He never explained the difference in meaning; its necessity only follows from a methodological preconception.