Valtiosääntöoikeus tutkimuskohteena - Juristin näkökulma politologille ja historioitsijalle

Authors

• Hannu Tapani Klami

Abstract

Law is norms and behaviour. It is often thought that law is, ultimately, only a behavioural phenomenon. This approach — in legal philosophy often called »realism» — entails such a method where normative explanations of human behaviour — understood in the sense of legal norms — are worthless. The author defends the relative independence and the raison d’etre of legal explanations of human behaviour in constitutional matters. In law there is no objectivity in the sense attributed to it by »science». But there is a certain truth, either audience-relativistic or systematically relativized: both types are common in judicial behaviour, and their truthvalue is accepted as a symbol of legalism. In law there is an everpresent need for objectivity, whether law is used for its original purpose, i.e. to solve concrete conflicts, or to legitimate certain patterns of the social structure or to regulate the society. This need for objectivity should be taken seriously both in political science and in history. In Finnish Constitutional Law a certain trend of this kind of »objectivity» has survived as an inheritance of the German Begriffsjurisprudenz which constituted the background of the present Finnish Constitution of the year 1919. Even scholars of law which do not accept the methodology of this school do often use similar argumentation in their legal opinions to the Committee for Constitutional Affairs of the Finnish Parliament. It is therefore indispensable that legal aspects of behaviour should be taken more seriously than hitherto.