votal question, how much weight they attributed to legal arguments supported by only one source of law, Swedish jurists managed to surprise legal scholars yet again by attributing far more importance to doctrinal opinions than anyone might have expected. Legal doctrine – widely assumed to lack binding force – was ranked the third most influential source of law, almost on a par with case law. These statistics are even more astounding when you consider that jurists have, for decades, been trained in their formal legal educations to adopt the conventional view on legal doctrine. Hence, it is probably safe to assume that the respondents have down-played the importance of legal doctrine in favour of conventionally higher-ranked sources such as statutory law and case law.The figures only make sense if legal doctrine, even the most humble commentary, is presumed to be more than just a cut-and-paste version of statutes, preparatory works, precedents and customs. It turns out that legal doctrine, after all, has a unique quality.The task of legal scholars is not merely to take stock of the legal material available. Instead, that which elevates legal doctrine to a standing on a par with other legal sources, is its systematic character: The aim of mainstream jurisprudence – legal dogmatics – is to turn an unmanageable and confusing hoard of legal arguments, originating from different sources of law, into a coherent system of norms, viz gällande rätt or geltendes Recht.The intention is not, in the first instance, to create unity in law. The challenge is instead to re-create a pre-existing unity, obscured by the dizzying plurality of legal sources.36 By the means mar i e sand st röm 305 34 Ibidem, p 603: Statutory law (77,5 percent), case law (9, 2 percent), legal doctrine (8, 1 percent) and preparatory works (4, 9 percent). 35 Nordling, ibidem, p 26. 36 This pre-existing unity in law was referred to by the founder of the Historical school, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, as the natural system (natürliches System).The natural unity of law might, or might not, coincide with the systematic constructs of law (ein Ideal), see Savigny, Friedrich Carl von,Juristische Methodenlehre (edWesenberg), Stuttgart 1951, p47and Sandström,Marie,Die Herrschaft der Rechtswissenschaft, Lund 1989, p 121. “Theory of law, or the doctrine, attempts to interpret legal norms and systematically develop the notion of law as a whole, thereby giving precision and limitations to legal norms that have come to existence in other ways…”35
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