How should the normative landscape and law’s place within it be conceptualized? On the face of things, people navigate a multiplicity of independent artificial normative systems—legal systems, sports, games, etiquette, fashion, families, and so forth—that are of their own making and that deliver and maintain rules and oughts that are only ‘formally’ normative and may conflict. In recent years, however, several prominent legal philosophers, Ronald Dworkin most notably, have advocated some version of a ‘one-system picture’ according to which appearances deceive, and we inhabit just a single domain of ‘real’, ‘genuine’, or ‘robust’ normativity. This chapter presents an alternative picture that aims to vindicate, rather than to refute, outward appearances—an alternative picture that, it is claimed, reflects background assumptions that legal positivists widely share but that is oddly marginalized, nearly invisible, in the current legal philosophical literature. It has three main ambitions: to surface and sharpen the central features of this ‘standard positivist picture’, to make sense of H. L. A. Hart’s own complex and shifting relationship to that picture, and to isolate and critically evaluate arguments advanced by one-system theorists that purport to show that such a picture is circular or eliminable. The chapter concludes by suggesting possible lessons that legal philosophers might learn by paying more systematic attention to the broader universe of artificial normative systems in which law is situated.