The Doctrine of the Sources of the Law

Abstract

It follows from the preceding chapters that legal practice should simultaneously fit two postulates: rationality of legal reasoning and fixity of the law. The remaining part of the book deals with the question, how these postulates affect the sources of law and legal method. An extensive study of this topic would require a comparison between many different legal orders. It would also require several distinctions, inter alia between constitutional law, statute law, case law etc. However, such a comprehensive study would exceed the limits of the present work. I must thus restrict the discussion to one country and one form of interpretation, that is, to Swedish customary norms, concerning the sources of the law and the method of statutory interpretation.