summary 229 number of potential legal arguments that courts and scholars alike must identify thereby decreased. In order to further differentiate the legal discourse from other paradigms, such as the political, historical and philosophical, and thereby overcoming difficulties arising out of the constant change in law, the Historical School introduced law-in-force as a basis for the application and study of law. With the help of this legal fiction, lawyers were able to adopt a dogmatic perspective on law, which transformed the otherwise diffuse and ever-changing content of the positive law into a complete and coherent system of norms. This fiction hence provided the stability and coherence needed for the application and study of law. Members of the Historical School were well aware that such a coherent and complete system in law constitutes a pure, albeit necessary, fiction for legal certainty and the scientific quality of law. In order for the system to manifest itself, lawyers had to act as though such a system actually existed. The way to achieve this was through the method of legal dogmatics. By using this method lawyers, selected and organized, both in the application and in the investigation of law, the norms with regard to a particular legal question, in such a way that the result met with the demands of coherence and non-contradiction of the legal system. As shown in the study, the concept of law-in-force is inseparable from the method of legal dogmatics.The use of a dogmatic perspective on law and the concept of law-in-force meant that in simple cases, the number of legal arguments to solve a legal question was limited to one, for each question at a given time. The Historical School concluded, that if law, from the point of view of the judge or scholar, must be regarded as a systemof legal norms or rather as a systemof legal solutions, then only one solution could be applicable to each and any legal issue. Otherwise, the coherence of the system would be compromised by gaps, overlaps and contradictions. By advocating a legal dogmatic approach to law in their legal methodology, the Historical School solved the problem regarding the lack of a basis for legal arguments in positive law, both in the practical and theoretical field. The school’s proponents predicted that the use of the concept of lawin-force in legal methodology would result in an increased legal certainty and predictability in the court’s application of the law. The concept law-in-force was soon adopted by Swedish legal scholars and became part of Swedish legal methodology. The principle jura novit curiain Swedish law therefore is an aspect of the concept, in the sense that
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