Hägerström wrote “Naturrätt i straffrättsvetenskapen?” (“Natural Law in Penal Jurisprudence?”) as a contribution to the debate on the fundamentals of penal jurisprudence between professors Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt, professor of private law, and Johan C.W.Thyrén, professor of penal law.316 The igniting spark to the debate was Lundstedt’s propaedeutics to his lecture series in contract and tort law (published as Principinledning. Kritik av straffrättens grundåskådningar, 1920), where he intended to lay bare the foundations of the modern doctrines of private law by means of a preliminary investigation into penal jurisprudence.317 Lundstedt’s thesis was that jurisprudence in general (and tort law in particular) worked from premisses built upon fictions and gratuitous constructions, without any basis either in reality or in proper science, and could be said to be guided by “scholastic conceptual jurisprudence” (Swedish: “skolastisk begreppsjurisprudens”). However, Lundstedt’s critique of tort law cannot properly be conducted without an excursus on penal law, which according to him also works with similar fanciful jurisprudential constructions, among them prohibitory norms, legal duty, objective wrong, and illegality.318 An additional reason to why Lundstedt chose penal law as his point of departure is that this topic, in contrast with contract and tort law, constitutes a relatively homogenous field of law, governed by a strict doctrine of sources as well as equally strict methodological restrictions - the principles of legality and its ban p a r t v i , c h a p t e r 6 478 6 . 4 “naturrätt i straf frättsvetenskapen?” (1920) : cri t ique of conce pts in juri sprudence 316 E.g., Hägerström, “Naturrätt?,” p. 333. See also, e.g., Lundstedt, Principinledning; “Replik till professor Thyrén,” Svensk Juristtidning (SvJT) 5 (1920);Thyrén, review of Vilhelm Lundstedt: Principinledning. Kritik av straffrättens grundåskådningar (Uppsala 1920), Svensk Juristtidning (SvJT) 5 (1920). 317 Lundstedt, Principinledning, pp. 5-6. 318 Ibid., p. 5.
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