been presented, it is in order to give a legal example. Natural law is the idea that positive law is a system of law subordinate to a higher legal order.This idea is especially prevalent in public law, constitutional law, and public international law.184 What furthermore characterizes natural law theory is that it lends the dictates of natural law a supreme normative power.185 However, this supreme normative authority is provided at the expense of clarity, concretization, and explanatory power. This is because in order to satisfy its own requirements and constitute the philosophical explanation to each rule of law as well as to achieve its own professed level of authority, natural law itself must be abstract and immutable.186 When it comes to explanatory power, natural law fails on account of its placing itself on a level above positive law, thus opening up to the possibility that there might just as well exist a further level of law above natural law etc, which entails that the objective determination of law in reality boils down to an infinite regress.187 All in all, in relationship to positive law natural law is abstract, but never realized or implemented.188 Hägerström also addressed a few issues of natural law that are of great importance to legal studies (provided that natural law constitutes a source of law at all). Separated from one another these issues are: a) issues of application; b) issues regarding the material content of natural law; c) scientific issues; and finally d) those issues regarding the function of natural law to justify or lend legitimacy to positive law. In short, the issues that must be analyzed are those regarding the relationship between natural law and positive law. Hägerström concludes that once pure reason has entered into law as a material principle of law, one has only provided law with a supreme normative principle devoid of any material content by means of which human conduct is to be a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 437 184 Ibid., pp. 202-220. 185 Ibid., p. 235. 186 Ibid., pp. 19, 145-148, 217, 240, 248. 187 Ibid., pp. 209-210. 188 Ibid., p. 249.
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