Hägerström understands the notion of legal causality in law in the following way. Legal dogmatics presupposes that legal norms come to actual implementation (if the opposite were to be assumed, then the dogmatic analysis of law would be meaningless). The formal validity of the rules of law require that there actually exists a willingness to apply, implement, and maintain these rules, and that this is true regardless of the form of government.236 Accordingly, legal dogmatics presupposes that it actually is the case that the rules of positive law in fact are implemented, but legal dogmatics does so without relapsing into an empirical investigation of the specific laws of physical nature (Swedish: naturlagarna), a natural causality that actually causes the rules of law to be implemented and applied.237 Hägerström’s description of the nature of legal causality is very similar to Ernst Zitelmann’s, who described the causal relationship between the legal fact and the legal consequence as being analogous, but not identical, to natural causality. To start with, the legal proposition (German: Rechtssatz) is a human construction in which two equally constructed sets of facts (the legal fact and the legal consequence) are categorically related to each other by a general hypothetical judgment that forms a rule, predicating that if a certain legal fact is at hand, then the corresponding legal consequence will invariably follow.238 Hägerström accepted Zitelmann’s description of the genesis of legal causality (an idea created with inspiration taken from nature, insofar as humans tend to think of, as well as understand, legal rights as if they were things, facts, and on the basis of this understanding model the relationships between the facts of law as one emulating natural causality).239 Hägerström also accepted the prevalent opinion of a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 453 5. 2 . 1 legal causal i ty and the taci t premi s se s of law 236 Hägerström, Stat och rätt, pp. 8-10. 237 Ibid. 238 Zitelmann, Irrtum und Rechtsgeschäft, pp. 204, 206-209, 220-229. 239 Ibid., pp. 200-229.
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