claims of legal validity upon the tenability of the conducted scientific demonstrations.188 The difference between the notion of legal science according to natural law theory and the Historical School’s notion of legal science and scientific law, appears manifest with respect to their different understandings of the status of natural law as being both a source of law and an object of scientific investigation. On account of its epistemological dismissal of natural law, the Historical School subscribed to the opinions of the legal theoreticians of the late 18th Century,which argued that natural law was legal philosophy, but not law proper.189 In essence, it was held that legal philosophy was a mere expression of legal politics rather than being a valid source of law190 - or that natural law and legal philosophy were binding de lege ferenda rather thande lege lata. In other words, while the 18th Century’s emerging new notion of law and doctrine of sources expressly accepted that natural law was a collection of rules that could contradict the material content of legislation, juridical practice, and customary law, without any adverse effects on the intrinsic validity of the principles of natural law, the Historical School held the opposite opinion, and rejected the tenability of such a notion of jurisprudential validity.The criteria of validity for scientific law to which the Historical School subscribed, neither gave the scientific treatment of law the freedom to arrive at conclusions contradicting the normative content of its object, namely positive law, nor did it allow legal science to disregard historical realities, and still retain its claim for validity.191 Accordingly, any incongruity existing between the conclusions and concepts of scientific law, and the remaining sources of law, invariably negated both the scientific truth and the practical validity of jurisprudential doctrines: p a r t v i i , c h a p t e r 2 612 188 Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft, pp. 78-93, 167-187, and 264-271. 189 Ibid., pp. 203-204. 190 Cf. ibid., pp. 104, 202-204, and 208. 191 Ibid., pp. 192-208. “Die Konkurrenz schließlich von ‘wissenschaftlichem’ (soweit man es
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