political considerations), fails to express “valid law”, and on the contrary expresses ethical postulates of the law.498 Or as Hägerström writes in another context:“Der Gegensatz zwischen Recht und Billigkeit kann nur auf der Unvollkommenheit der gesetzlichen Formulierung beruhen, die ihremWesen nach immer nur allgemein gehalten sein kann.”499 If Kelsen’s strict grammatico-literal doctrine of statute interpretation, combined with the Grundnorm, is taken into consideration then it is manifest that according to him any determination of law not directly deduced from the statute itself is wanting in constitutionality, that is, lack of compliance with Kelsen’s theory of the Stufenbau as well as his fiction of the Grundnorm, whereby the legal conclusion or finding is strictly speaking legally uncorroborated and thus invalid.500 So if Hägerström is correct in his analysis of Kelsen, then it follows that any extensive interpretation of a statute is invalid; any restrictive interpretation of statute is invalid; any analogous application of a statute is invalid; any systematic interpretation of a single statutory provision runs the risk of coming into conflict with the statute’s own system, thus becoming invalid; any historical interpretation of a statute not directly in compliance with the exact text of the statute becomes invalid; and finally, only the exact application of the wording of the statute is valid. But, the problem is that interpretation of statutes becomes necessary whenever the statute itself fails to provide a clear meaning, and therefore must have its exact linguistic meaning supplemented, which Kelsen’s doctrine of interpretation prohibits, thereby making any normal act of interpretation impossible. If this is the case, what good is the interpretation of a statute?What might explain the problem is that Kelsen’s closed view of law can be understood as being a form or derivation of the highly formalistic Begriffsjurisprudenz, p a r t v i , c h a p t e r 8 536 498 Hägerström, “Kelsen,” p. 94. 499 Hägerström, Magistratische Ius, p. 70. 500 Hägerström,“Kelsen,” pp. 93-95. Cf. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre: Einleitung in die rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik, pp. 90-114.
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