Kelsen’s exhortation to find the law within norms was received by Ross as producing merely ‘endless repetion’. In response, Ross suggested that we should instead relocate our endeavours to the terrain of ‘psycho-social reality’—namely, the empirical examination of the ideology which underpinned the acts of the judiciary. Yet despite the expansion and conceptual refinement of this move from formalism to realism in the attempt to empirically capture the content of legal consciousness, we find that Ross not only reproduces a jurisprudential formalism, but sociologically and ethically fails to move beyond the empiricism and non-cognitivism that inspired his critique of Kelsen. This in turn prevents access to a deeper sociological analysis and critique. In response to this, and building on Habermas’s theory of law and society and on Alan Brudner’s theory of authority, we outline a suggestion for a model of the evolution of legal consciousness as an institutionalized form of reason.