dards is a common denominator of all the theories and doctrines that Hägerström subjected to scientific condemnation. Throughout the history of legal science, the status of statute law in the doctrine of sources has remained relatively constant.The main developments were effectuated with respect to customary law, judicial practice, and scientific doctrine.With reference to the remainder of this book and its emphasis on scientific reasoning and its results, Part VII of this study has only had reason to investigate the status of scientific doctrine as a source of law.The crucial issue of Hägerström’s jurisprudential production and philosophical analysis of law has consistently been that of the authority of legal science to act as a source of law.What is the basis of such claims? Is the basis to be derived from metaphysical claims of authority, such as the unbroken link between the substantive super positive premisses of the conclusions and doctrines of legal science - namely an unbroken link between what is intrinsically just and its jurisprudential definition? Or is it the correspondence between jurisprudential conclusions and doctrines and the law of men, namely legislation, customary law, judicial practice, and scientifically well-founded legal opinions in law?With regard to the doctrines of method it is mostly on scientific method that the changes have been manifest, as practicing jurists are bound by other much more tangible strictures, such as the direct commands of sovereigns over the activities of the judiciary, than intellectual clarity and reliability. Even if legal scholars have contended to have the liberty to disregard and even contradict the principles of material law, practicing jurists have on the whole lacked such liberty, as all of their decisions and findings must refer to positive law in one aspect or another. So while legal scholars have been able to experiment with metaphysical sources of law and metaphysical methods of ascertaining law, any shift in the understanding of science, scientific object, scientific objectivity, and scientific method will affect the validity of the scientifically legitimated sources of law, jurisprudential doctrine, rather a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 649
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