particular ideas of positive law can be construed as being expressions of the universal notion of a legal duty.198 The problem is that Hägerström arrives at contradictory results when applying a purely Kantian point of view on legal science, because when he distinguishes the science of legal dogmatics from other perspectives of law and other fields of legal science, he defines legal dogmatics in a manner that lends to the conclusion that it, in fact, is a practically oriented activity.199 Legal dogmatics is a study of law that investigates law from an immanent point of view, since the norms that jurisprudence has to investigate do not exist by virtue of themselves, autonomously of the real world, but on the contrary form part of the sources of law and judicial practice.200 Furthermore, legal dogmatics, in contrast with legal philosophy, is duty bound to investigate given law. Finally, the practical application of law constitutes an important aspect of legal dogmatics.201 What poses a problem is that the excessively analytic concept of legal dogmatics, as espoused by Hägerström inStat och rätt, is too rigid to be of any real practical importance.To any practitioner of law the problem is rarely what one can infer analytically from the rules of positive law, but rather what can be inferred synthetically from the same rules (as the synthesis of law necessitates that the jurist must give conclusive advice, or arrive at conclusive findings that go beyond the strict letter of the law, and yet be bound by the same letter of the law, which quite naturally weakens the tenability and thus the authority of the finding). In other words, the jurist must give advice on the basis of an interpretation of a text.The problem is thus one of argumentative authority.Analytical conclusions have more authority than synthetic interpretations. In his later texts Hägerström abandons the idea that legal dogmatics is purely anap a r t v i , c h a p t e r 4 440 198 Ibid., p. 17. 199 Cf. Kant’s defintion of legal studies, in Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties: Der Streit der Fakultäten, pp. 24-26 and 79-94. 200 Hägerström, Stat och rätt, pp. 2-3. 201 Ibid., pp. 8-11.
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