The article under studies deals with significance of empirical arguments in juridical methodology. It relies on the fact that empirical dimension of law is an interesting and complicated issue, and E. Ehrlich’s concept of norms is one of the best solutions to it. This solution contains quite a few open questions, and the modern juridical methodology seeks answers to them both with the help of tools known a hundred or more years ago and in the ways developed in the last fifty years within the framework of the theory of juridical argumentation.
 The purpose of the article is to reveal the empirical nature of norms for decision. In order to achieve the goal, it is essential to answer the questions about the concept of the empirical dimension of law, the relationship between reality and necessity, etc., as well as the question about the empirical nature of norms for decision. All in all, the article analyzes the concept of the empirical effect of law, and specifically, how norms for decision make it possible to take into account the empirical aspects of the implementation of law. It has been ascertained that the empirical dimension of law is an approach to law based on the issue of the relationship between reality and necessity. In other words, it is the question of how one can move from reality to necessity, which is impossible within the so-called alethic system of Theophrastus and the corresponding deontic interpretation, the former allowing only the transition from necessity to reality, but not vice versa. Norms for decision are one of the tools for solving an empirical problem, which means that empirical arguments are applied within the framework of the so-called general practical arguments (for example, the results of demographic or other sociological studies, forecasting future outcomes of court proceedings based on statistical data on previous proceedings in similar cases, etc).