Alf Ross et le réalisme juridique scandinave

Intervention de Henrik Palmer Olsen, professeur de droit à l'Université de Copenhague, dans le cours de Master "Théorie du Droit" de l'Université Paris Nanterre. Henrik Olsen focalisera son intervention sur les travaux d'Alf Ross, principal représentant du réalisme juridique scandinave.

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”.