of the interested party’s emotions, evaluations, values, and attitudes, and never a statement of fact. According to Hägerström’s rough outline of events, the judge proceeds as follows when interpreting the law, statute law - not customary law:The judge starts by reading the latest edition of the statutes; then interprets the relevant passages; on the one hand according to their historical purpose (what is generally called subjective teleology); and on the other, according to their rational meaning (what is generally called objective teleology); the judge then proceeds by referring to case law and precedents in order to find any specific rule or principle previously applied by judges in similar cases; and finally, he tries to determine the learned opinion which is supposed to posses both insights into the historical legislator’s intentions as well as into the rational meaning of the statute, which in effect implies that jurisprudence is considered toconstruct rational rules of law from thewording of legislation.258 Hägerström defines historical and objective methods of interpretation in the following way. In the case of historical interpretation the judge inquires, what the historical legislator actually intended with the legislative product. In the case of objective interpretation, the judge constructs rules that according to the wording of the law and with reference to the public interests are rational.259 In either case, the task of the judge or legal scholar is to determine what is called valid law (Swedish: gällande rätt, German: geltendes Recht). However, Hägerström describes valid law as an enigmatic and near intangible concept that enters into existence once the judge has made his decision final rather than exist as a material guide to the judge in the execution of his official duties.Accordingly, the judge creates his own rules of valid law by an analysis of positive law (including case law and other a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 371 4 . 2 inte rpretat ion of norms 258 Hägerström, “Stat och statsformer (1921),” p. 216. 259 Ibid.
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