Lecture by Henrik Palmer Olsen, Professor of Law at the University of Copenhagen, in the "Théorie du Droit" Master's course at Université Paris Nanterre. Henrik Olsen will focus on the work of Alf Ross, the leading exponent of Scandinavian legal realism.

Abstract

Alf Ross is the leading proponent of so called Scandinavian Legal Realism – a movement in legal theory which insist that that the scientific study of law must focus on empirical facts about “perceptions” of law. Law cannot be understood as normativity in isolation from how this normativity is experienced.

Scandinavian Legal Realism and Ross in particular translated Hägerströms moral nihilism to law. For Ross, this means that there is no ultimate foundation for law. In the article I have attached, he criticizes another world famous (and still influential) legal theorist: Hans Kelsen. Kelsen saw “valdidity” as the form through which we should scientifically study law. Every legal norm will find it’s validity in higher legal norm. At the end highest level is the Constitution. Above that is a “presupposed” norm that Kelsen calls the Grundnorm. This is a metaphysical construction: A hypothetical imperative. Ross attacks this view (“The isolated doctrine is an abstraction that floats in the air”) and claims that to study law we must study “the psycho-social foundations of the legal ideology in the real experienced behavioural attitudes”.