argues that it is the legislator’s will that shall serve as an overriding interpretative principle when determining a statute’s scope of application, the will-theory is confronted with an equally strong demand for social harmony - in other words, these interests (manifested through the activities of the legislator) must be balanced by other interests in order to avoid other more important interests of society running the risk of being suppressed.255 However, one must keep in mind that the relative content, extent, weight, and importance of the balancing interests are ultimately determined by the person applying the rule,256 a fact that quite naturally affects the objectivity and legitimacy of judicial decisions and law-making (at least, for example, when a judge must decide a controversial issue transcending the borders between law and politics). Hägerströmholds that legal principles, for instance, legal obligation and illegality, are infused with super-sensible elements, but that traditional legal science nevertheless allows these principles to serve as guiding principles in the construction of law. It is thus logical that Hägerström gives “effect” and “interest” the status of real interpretative facts, especially since “effect” and “interest” constitute palpable products and factors of the legal order, especially when making law. However, when transferred to the interpretative process, it is only one of these factors that can be determined in a truly empirical fashion both as an idea and as a reality, namely the effects of the law.The other factor, the interest, can only be decided as being at hand or not, while the intrinsic truth value of the interest is indeterminable, because the truth value of an interest, according to Hägerström’s theory of values and morals, is from an epistemological point of view merely an expression p a r t v, c h a p t e r 4 370 255 Ibid.: p. 326. 256 Ibid. 257 For the remainder of this Chapter see also Part VI, Chapter 8. 4 . 1 law: conce pts and inte rpretat ion257
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