Field Notes

source

Hägerström och juridiken

en kommentar

StatusStableUpdatedStands on1 sourceSupportsnotes

Åke Frändberg’s two-page comment in Svensk Juristtidning 2011 s. 94 (saved copy) attacks Reidunn Laurén’s article “Hägerström och juridiken” (SvJT 2010 s. 821) as a lapse in the journal’s editorial judgment.

The specific errors Frändberg catalogues are factual: that natural law was a generally held conviction in 1911, when nineteenth-century will-theory positivism had left it widely regarded as moribund; that David Hume was a natural-law philosopher, when Hume launched the decisive attack on rationalist natural law; and that Konrad Marc-Wogau and Anders Wedberg were legal scholars without deeper philosophical training, when both were professors of theoretical philosophy.

The comment matters to this wiki for its framing rather than its corrections. Frändberg’s charge is that the article recycles “de sedvanliga schablonerna om Hägerströms påverkan på juristerna” — the usual clichés about Axel Hägerström’s influence on the legal profession — and he names Patricia Mindus, Max Lyles, and Jes Bjarup as the scholars the journal should have asked instead. A professor emeritus of jurisprudence treating the standard influence narrative as cliché is a caution on any argument built from that narrative, and Realist foundations of Swedish rättssäkerhet deficits carries it as one of four limits on its own claim.

One aside is evidence in the other direction. Frändberg, building an analogy for the severity of Laurén’s error, remarks that Per Olof Ekelöf took three credits under Hägerström in his undergraduate degree — offered by a hostile witness, which is what makes it useful.

Built on 1 source (1 external).

Working out connections…