matters.506 How does this restriction placed upon law and legal practice affect the validity of legal argumentation? Under what circumstances do legal conclusions gain validity? Is it when the legal conclusions and findings copy the content of positive law? Or is it when legal findings and conclusions constitute strictly logical applications of superior norms - that is, when the findings and conclusions are deductively inferred? Or is it when the legal conclusions are based upon the acceptance of a certain legal theory? Hägerström construes the central principle of legal positivism as claiming that law is positive in the spatio-temporal sense of the word. Law is an object belonging to this world as well as it is a human artifact (in its form of an expression of human will). From this premiss, it does not necessarily follow that Hägerström adheres to a naïve positivistic understanding of legal concepts and legal practice, or that he adheres to the will-theory of law. Positive law certainly constitutes the natural point of departure for every jurist, but this does not necessitate a corresponding acceptance of the will-theory of law or its consequences, for example, that non-statute law should be excluded from the doctrine of sources, on account of a naïve understanding of law as nothing more that the statute book, or that positive law constitutes a perfect system of material rules, on account of positive law allowing every case to be solved with reference to this specific system of law. In Rätten och staten, Das magistratische Ius in seinem Zusammenhang mit dem römischen Sakralrechte and “Till frågan om begreppet gällande rätt,”Hägerström argues that valid law determines the norp a r t v i , c h a p t e r 8 538 506 See Hägerström,“Begreppet gällande rätt,” pp. 63-64. Here Hägerström argues that Alf Ross and Hans Kelsen are legal positivists insofar as they both base the validity of a legal finding on its correspondence to a given system of norms, albeit that Kelsen disqualifies himself on account of his non-positive Grundnorm and Alf Ross disqualifies himself on account of his sociological bent (p. 72). 8 . 3. 1 the not ion of val id law according to häge r ström’s vari ety of legal pos i t ivi sm
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