valid law and to apply the law in an objective as well as a foreseeable and socially acceptable manner. Hägerström’s teleological method thus constituted one of allowing so-called realism and realistic arguments to openly influence statute interpretation, and did so by dispelling the fiction that legal interpretation, application, and jurisprudence constituted logically closed legal activities governed only by juristic considerations. The method opened up these activities to realistic and legally acknowledged arguments, such as, for example, the demands of trade, social production and general welfare and safety, in short, the good of society, rather than letting the interpretation and application of law be governed by unrealistic fictitious jurisprudential constructions. Finally, according to Hägerström, traditional jurisprudence not only took the law into its own hands, but also high-handedly constructed new legal facts and legal consequences from nothing, thereby intervening in the existing legal causality between existing legal facts and consequences. Hägerström’s critique in this form is especially frequent when it comes to his analysis of fundamental legal concepts, terms, and theories, for instance, the natural law theory; the will-theory (in both its public, private and theoretical meaning); the will of the legal order or state; the concept of jural basis as being the condition for a valid rule of law; the so-called common sense of justice; the traditional concepts of subjective rights and duties; and the concept of valid law.573 The scrutiny to which Hägerström subjected these concepts to forced him to either dismiss them on account of their lack of reality (a deficiency that corresponded to their purported basis in a superior legal order, that of natural law) or redefine them (which was done when the concept had a factual, that is, legal basis, but lacked a realistic definition).Among the former group of concepts, we find the will-theory, the jural basis for a rule of law a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 559 573 See Lundstedt’s definition of valid lawas something further than the bare texts of the legal sources. Lundstedt, Rätten och samhället, pp. 50-51 and 66-67.
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