directed against a specific person regarding a specific legal transaction, to perform or deliver what was due.83 In other words, in Rome obligatio lacked the universally binding power character that it was endowed with by natural law theory. Therefore, on account of traditional legal concepts passed on by natural law to modern law and jurisprudence, modern law regards these areas of law as primarily dealing with universal duties, namely the duties of men in general to respect the rights of creditors, owners, and possessors in general, rather than regarding the Roman law of obligations and things as pertaining to the relationships between the specific parties of specific, identifiable, legal disputes, actions, or relationships.84 What must be noted is that natural law conducted jurisprudence with the specific ideological premisses in mind that real rights and duties were legal concepts that were valida priori, which, on the other hand, positive rights and duties were not; and that the real rights thus were universal and necessary to their nature.Taking into consideration that natural law’s legal analysis of private law was performed with this specific ideological goal in mind, then natural law’s formulation of the legal relationships of private law, as a set of absolutely certain, and universally valid and applicable rights and duties is fully understandable. Hägerström, among other things, proved this fact by showing how the merely morally binding system of ius naturale was transformed into a legally binding legal order (akin to the binding power of ius gentium). It must be added that according to the natural jurists held bothius naturale and ius gentiumequal to ius necessariumand thus naturally binding law for all men.85 a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 403 83 Buckland, Roman Private Law, pp. 32- 33 and 247-252; Schulz, Classical Roman Law, pp. 455-450; Kaser and Knütel, Römisches Privatrecht, pp. 203-204. 84 Cf. Hägerström,“Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” pp. 609-612; Recht, Pflicht etc, pp. 59-63. 85 Cf. Hägerström, “Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” pp. 594-597 and 603; Recht, Pflicht etc, pp. 41-44 and 52. See also Kaser, Ius gentium, pp. 54-74 (for a description of the unclear relationship between ius gentiumand ius naturale).
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