governed.And any right or duty of rational law is of no consequence when it comes to deciding what the priority should be between competing interests, rights and duties.189 In fact, the principles of rational law do not provide jurists with any practical guidelines on how a case should be decided.190 Hägerström continues, in reality, the natural law or the law valid a priori is nothing but abstract principles of law, which are assumed to be included in, as well as intrinsic to, pure reason.191 However, this reliance upon pure reason as constituting the ultimate source of law, leads to the inevitable consequence that the living notion of law and that of abstract philosophical law become divided. This, furthermore, also includes a dualistic notion of law, wherein positive law and rational law constitute the opposites of one another. On the one hand, this dualism of law includes the notion that rational law lacks practical, legal validity, while on the other, positive law loses its supreme philosophical justification.192 To sum up, natural law only causes disorder once it enters into legal science as an explanation.To be more precise Hägerström was of the definite opinion that natural law and legal politics had nothing at all to do with legal science proper.193 A further fact that is even more remarkable is that the purely philosophical approach towards the study of law invariably results in philosophical determinations that lack real relevance to practical jurists. The reason is that the philosophical investigation of law, in contrast with the dogmatic analysis of law, has a different point of departure. Legal philosophy starts from a point of principled indifference to the legal material as such. Its approach is purely analytical approach.The practical jurist, of necessity has a different approach towards the legal material. In contrast to the philosop a r t v i , c h a p t e r 4 438 189 Ibid., p. 145. 190 Ibid., p. 146. Cf. the Historical School’s critique of natural law, PartVII, Chapter 2. 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid., pp. 10, n.
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