might have been,229 its credo was: Only the law of the land, the people, the statutes, and jurisprudence can substantiate the construction of valid legal concepts.230 Puchta:“Eine juristische Ansicht nun ist dann Recht, wenn sie wissenschaftlich begründet, also wenn sie wahr ist.”231 According to Puchta, scientific truth had a formal as well as a material component.The formal was constituted by the proposition’s systematic consistency, while the material component was made up of the proposition’s accordance with the communis opinio of jurists, which constituted a legal source of knowledge, but not a source of law proper.232 By means of the initial positivism of the 19th Century, legal science managed to gain and maintain practical relevance to practicing jurists. The practical aspects of Pandectism and Begriffsjurisprudenzmade themselves manifest through their rigorous systematization of law, as well as the positive basis of their conceptual apparatus. On the downside, during the latter part of the 19th Century and the early 20th Century, critics found that this systematization and conceptual construction was driven to a formalistic and abstract extreme, separating jurisprudence from the living law.233 A typical expression of such conceptualistic extremes is to be found in the conceptual realism that is characteristic of Pandectism, Begriffsjurisprudenz, and natural law theory. Incidentally, this is one reason why Hägerström repeatedly and incessantly argued that jurisprudence (and legal thought) was penetrated by “natural law” - that is, legal metaphysics.234 p a r t v i i , c h a p t e r 2 620 229 See, e.g., Wilhelm, Juristischen Methodenlehre, pp. 88-128 and 157-159; Heck, “Die Begriffsjurisprudenz,” pp. 191-200; Wagner, Die politische Pandektistik, pp. 11-29; Björne, Den nordiska rättsvetenskapen 3, pp. 208-258. 230 Puchta, Gewohnheitsrecht I, pp. 143-148. 231 Ibid., p. 166. My italics! 232 Ibid., pp. 163 and 166-167. However, see Jhering,“Unsere Aufgabe,” pp. 17-18; Geist 2:II, pp. 384-414. Windscheid, Lehrbuch des Pandektenrechts, pp. 36-47 and 59-61. Both Jhering andWindscheid endow scientific law with near automatic and autonomous validity. 233 Wilhelm, Juristischen Methodenlehre, pp. 80-87;Wagner, Die politische Pandektistik, pp. 11-17;Wieacker, History, pp. 344-346. 234 Cf. Hägerström who argued that the validity of the jurisprudential concepts was threatened by the extreme lengths that the conceptualism of Pandectism and Be-
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