lary that a properly performed juridical act of necessity becomes public, either by being conducted in the presence of witnesses, or being brought to public attention through other external means, thus indicating that a juridical act of a specific type has been concluded - for example, the drafting of a written will, or the tradition of goods, pledges, securities, and depositions, and so on. What the formulas of Roman law actually lay bare is the basic structure of legal causality.The formulas constitute didactic examples of how we perceive the causality of the birth, life, and death of legal positions. For instance, if X, then Z. If a person, A, has performed the following actions, then another person, B, is in the following legal position, and has this or that specific legal right or duty. Furthermore, the animistic beliefs stipulate what the boundaries and forms of a legal fact must measure up to in order to bring about the desired effect. The problems connected to the use of reificated legal definitions and concepts, according to Hägerström, were that they brought legal science to invalid determinations of (the) law. From a strictly formal point of view, if one tried to formulate a truly objective norm determining whether or not a phenomenon was of a legal nature, and based this determination upon an empirically given set of law, then this definition of law would constitute a summary of the specific historical legal material that had been studied, rather than constitute a truly formal definition of law.36 To Hägerström, the Historical School of jurisprudence’s overemphasis on historical argument, its historicism, constitutes an example of such invalid inferences.37 In Der römische Obligationsa ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 387 1. 3 hi storici sm and re i f icat ion of legal conce pts : problems 36 Hägerström, Stat och rätt, p. 22. 37 Cf.Wilhelm, Zur juristischen Methodenlehre im19. Jahrhundert: die Herkunft der Methode Paul Labands aus der Privatrechtswissenschaft, pp. 36-44, 69, 80-87, and 117-121.Wilhelm sees the Historical School’s preoccupation with the historical element as the direct origin of the Begriffsjurisprudenz. Cf. Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft: Geschichte
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