20th Century doctrine held that legal encyclopedia, legal philosophy, legal history, legal economics, legal sociology, legal dogmatics, and legal politics ought to be sharply distinguished from one another.The reasons for this partition and sub-categorization of legal science into distinct fields of scientific study originated in the collapse of the Law of Reason, which treated all aspects of legal study as being equally normative, irrespective of their logical relationship to the express norms of positive law. If one found a fact that could be treated or construed normatively, then one reificated it and made it essential to man and hence a part of natural law - that is, it became an ideal for positive law. This constituted a synthesis of facts and norms that Hume and Kant demonstrated to be scientifically indefensible.To the Historical School, such an indiscriminate use of “facts” makes the jurisprudential analysis less legally binding than otherwise, as such a use of facts blurred the distinction betweenlex lata andlex ferenda. The Historical School wished to stress that the purpose of the investigation needed to be clearly defined. If the purpose of a jurisprudential analysis of law is that the result should serve as a source of law, as a guide to a presumptive judge or other practitioner of law,then the analysis in question must take a practical and normative perspective as its point of departure - and all other aspects and fields of legal science must be treated as being secondary and supplementary to the dogmatic analysis of law. Legal positivism, however, has failed to maintain rigorously its own scientific standards.These standards require that the conclusions of jurisprudence are actually possible to infer objectively, by means of accepted scientific standards and methods, from the sources of positive law. Accordingly, Hägerström’s critique of certain theories and doctrines of legal positivism is similar in nature to his critique of natural law in general, namely defects in scientific validity and rigor, whereby the pejorative “natural law” applied to theories and doctrines of legal positivism is logically consistent.A general failure to uphold strict scientific stanp a r t v i i i 648
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