ing to legal science (of which the legislative committee might have been unaware).To the legislative committee it was quite clear that these arguments were political rather than scientific.426 For according to Hägerström’s analysis, the relationship between natural law and positive law, according to natural legal theory, was that the real world, positive, legislator was subject to a superior law, which restricted the liberty of the legislator in penal matters, a law that bound the legislator irrespective of positive law.427 As Hägerström has shown, certain duties are generally held to exist irrespective of their actual existence in positive legislation. From a policy perspective, this lack of actuality has no effect, as these super-positive duties may be construed, if not as actual duties, as legislative ideals.However, if the perspective is shifted from policy to science, then natural duty’s lack of positive support invariably undermines its authority as an argument of law, redirecting it back to policy, which only binds the politician, but not the jurist.428 In this case, it is the issue of legitimacy and authority that delimits the range of the scientific argumentation.The reason is that it is only within the scientific discourse that scientific arguments have any direct bearing. In penal law it is manifestly obvious that jurisprudence has its field of relevance expressly restricted to reasons and arguments de lege lata, since jurisprudence (just as in case law) is bound to the letter of the statutes in a far more restricting manner than in the field of private law.This also entails that penal jurisprudence is redirected from meaningless constructions of law back to penal law, legislation itself. And it is legislation that constitutes the specific text that is the subject matter of interpretation, and the matter that must be penetrated in a specific a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 511 7. 1. 1 the l imi ts of the sci ent i f ic argument 426 Ibid.: p. 314. 427 Ibid. 428 Cf., e.g., Hägerström, “Begreppet viljeförklaring,” pp. 99-100; “Declaration of Intention,” pp. 299-300.
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