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Något om Ekelöfs teleologiska metod

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Hannu Tapani Klami’s review essay in Svensk Juristtidning 1990 s. 226 (saved copy) defends Per Olof Ekelöf’s teleological method of statutory interpretation against what Klami takes to be a generation of unfair textbook criticism. It is nominally a review of the 1990 supplement to Rättegång I, and in practice the most sustained sympathetic account of the method in the Swedish literature.

Two passages carry weight beyond the review’s own argument.

Klami attributes the method’s foundations to the school directly: Ekelöf “i grund och botten representerar den skandinaviska realismen,” and his willingness to treat precedent as binding even where the precedent does not itself reflect teleological reasoning is offered as characteristically realist (s. 228). This is a proceduralist’s attribution of Ekelöf to Scandinavian legal realism, independent of the intellectual-history literature that reaches the same conclusion.

The second passage complicates the wiki’s reading of Ekelöf on Rättssäkerhet. Klami argues that critics routinely overlook how important a teleological argument rättssäkerhet was for Ekelöf, and that the predictability grounded in the statutory text does its work precisely through rättssäkerhet reasoning (s. 227, point 4(2)). The concept was therefore operative inside the method rather than discarded by it, which is why Realist foundations of Swedish rättssäkerhet deficits states its disarmament claim as a captivity in the formal register rather than as an absence of vocabulary.

The review is also a bibliography of the method’s critics. Klami lists Phillips Hult and Åke Malmström (both SvJT 1952), Alf Ross in Om ret og retfærdighed, Stig Strömholm, Jacob Sundberg’s Fr. Eddan t. Ekelöf (1978), and — for criminal law specifically — Hans Thornstedt’s “Legalitet och teleologisk metod i straffrätten” (Festskrift för Nils Herlitz, 1955), which he marks as very critical. Thornstedt is the unread source most likely to bear on the method’s effect on the legality principle.

Klami (1945–2002) was a Finnish professor of civil law who also worked on evidence theory and legal method, which places him outside the Swedish faculty disputes the method’s reception was entangled with.

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