ted party with the power to legally obligate other legal subjects on a universal rather than a bilateral level.122 The definition of legal duties and rights as universally binding appears to constitute a show-case example of natural law in its purest form, and is as such of no consequence to modern legal theory. Nevertheless, natural law’s definition of rights and duties has been incorporated into modern legal theory, and it is thus an issue that modern legal theory must address. Primarily from an epistemological and methodological perspective, which is due to that the aforementioned jurisprudential definition of rights and duties formally purports to be based upon Roman law, while in reality the jurisprudential definition transcends the material content of the sources of Roman law and gives rights and duties near universal validity and application, which makes the definition of rights, insofar as it is to be descriptive, untenable:This, incidentally, proves Hägerström’s point that legal positivism hitherto constituted an unfinished project. p a r t v i , c h a p t e r 2 418 122 Cf. Hägerström, “Nehrman-Ehrenstråles uppfattning,” pp. 573-574; Recht, Pflicht etc, pp. 13-16. Regarding obligatio and the concept’s development from the Roman right to an action to the natural lawyers’ notion of it as an universal obligation, see Hartung, Die Naturrechtsdebatte, pp. 69-82.
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