The Philosophy of Scandinavian Legal Realism

Abstract.  The jurisprudential movement known as Scandinavian Legal Realism was founded by the Swedish philosopher Axel Hägerström and the Danish philosopher and jurist Alf Ross in order to destroy the distorting influence of metaphysics upon legal thinking and to provide the secure philosophical foundation for scientific knowledge of the law. I shall present Hägerström's philosophical theory and argue that he is committed to the metaphysical view that the world in time and space consists of causal regularities between things and events devoid of any values that is related to his epistemological view that what there is can be known by experience. Hägerström's philosophy advances a naturalistic approach that conceives the positive law as a system of rules in terms of behavioural regularities among human beings and legal knowledge as an empirical inquiry into the causal relations between legal rules and human behaviour. This approach is followed by his pupils, the Swedish lawyers A. V. Lundstedt and Karl Olivecrona, whereas Ross appeals to logical positivism. The naturalistic approach should be taken seriously since it leaves no room for the normativity of the law and for legal knowledge in terms of reasons for belief and action.