  Some have argued directly that law does not require coercive backing in order to count as law (e.g., Raz 1975), holding that what is instead important is that law is made by the appropriate authority (see also Oberdiek 1976).  Responding to Joseph Raz, Edmundson, and Lamonde, inter alia, Ekow Yankah defends the traditional view connecting law and coercion, contending that “Legal norms must be ultimately enforceable by coercion to be included in the core concept of the law” (Yankah 2008, 1198). After developing his own non-moralized conception of coercion, Yankah argues that law requires not only authority but the ability to compel obedience. There are, after all, many different possible normative systems, for example religious ones, that claim to have moral authority to command obedience, but law is distinctive among them because it has the possibility to compel compliance with the edicts of justified authorities.  Countering Raz's view that coercion might be merely instrumentally needed, Yankah asserts, “the inability of any structure to even theoretically compel [a lawbreaker] to obey would cast serious doubt on the system's claim to be the law” (Yankah, 2008, 1236).