SCANDINAVIAN LEGAL REALISM Scandinavian Jurisprudents 1. 2. 3. 4.

Axel Hagerstrom (1868-1939) Vilhelm Lundstedt (1882-1955) Karl Olivecrona (1893-1963) Alf Ross (1894-1974)

Critique of Judicial Legal Realism According to Alf Ross, the perceptions of Holmes, Gray and Frank that the law is indefinable w/o dealing with the environment and predispositional metalegal factors operating in the judicial process suffers from the failure to separate the issue of validity from the question of reality in the judicial process. The point raised by Ross is that there is over-reliance on the role of the metalegal stimuli in the judicial process and overemphasis on the vicissitudes of fact-finding in the courts. Critique of Legal Ideology According to Lundstedt, the insistence of legal realism on certainty and predictability in the legal order, commendable though it may be, is relatively less problematic than the danger posed by legal ideology. The peril to be avoided in legal ideology is that its intellectual patterns are abstract and vague. In other words, legal ideology does not have a fix meaning but depends on the preference of its proponents and interpreters. Olivecrona adds that the propensity to objectivize values in the analysis of the nature of the law and its component system of jural relations gives the wrong impression that such values have real basis when there is none. Nature of Law Lundstedt states that the legal activities that is to say legislation, execution of statutes, and adjudication of cases are essential to the social order, and to assure the legal ordering of society the law and its component jural relations must be based on the felling for justice prevalent and current within society. This is different from the concept of justice propounded by the natural law philosophers which indicates or points to the one and only solution. Thus, for phychological legal realism, the law and its component system of jural relations are real because they are social facts. The evaluation is no longer left to axiological criteria but to the feeling of what is good for the society. However, the judgment of value involved is problematic. Lundstedt explains that the feeling for what is good for society is not an abstract criterion but a fact of conscious behavior since it is psychologically real. Olivecrona adds that the reality of law and jural relations as social facts is based on the general human feeling that what is good for society is paramount. As Olivecrona puts it, laws involved behavioral patterns since they deal basically with the exercise of rights and the performance of obligations.

CASES: Primitivo Ansay, etc. et.al. v. The Board of Directors of the National Development Company, et.al. Appellants filed a complaint praying for a 20% Christmas bonus. Appellees filed a motion to dismiss. CFC ruled that petitioners have no cause of action to secure such bonus. A bonus is an act of liberality. The court has no power to compel a party to comply with a moral obligation. Appellants filed a motion for reconsideration but was denied, hence this appeal. Appellants contend that there exists a cause of action in their complaint. Issue: Whether or not the company is obliged to give 20% bonus since the claim of the appellants rests on moral grounds or what is defined by law as natural obligation Held: Natural Obligations are those based on equity and natural law, which are not enforceable by means of court action, but which after voluntary fulfillment by the obligor, authorize the retention by the obligee of what has been delivered or rendered by reason thereof. These refer to obligations without sanction, susceptible of voluntary performance, but not through compulsion by legal means. Case Analysis: Scandinavian Legal Realism views the law as the means of regulating human behavior based on the feeling for what is best for the social welfare. They believe that legal ideology has no place in the conception of the law and its component jural relations. The conventional concepts of right and obligation are verbal magic.