Legal rules, as we have seen, may correspond with moral
rules in the sense of requiring or forbidding the same behaviour.
Those that do so are no doubt felt to be as important as
their moral counterparts. Yet importance is not essential to
the status of all legal rules as it is to that of morals. A legal
rule may be generally thought quite unimportant to maintain;
indeed it may generally be agreed that it should be
repealed: yet it remains a legal rule until it is repealed. It
would, on the other hand, be absurd to think of a rule as part
of the morality of a society even though no one thought it any
longer important or worth maintaining. Old customs and
traditions now maintained merely for old time's sake may,
indeed, once have had the status of moral rules, but their
status as part of morality has evaporated together with the
importance attached to their observance and breach.