Publication
Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy
Volume
34
Page
103
Year
2009
Abstract
Scandinavian legal realism was a movement of the early and middle decades of the 20th century, which paralleled the American legal realist movement, while presenting a more skeptical challenge to legal reasoning and discourse. The present paper was written for a forthcoming Oxford University Press collection on the Scandinavian realists. The approach to jurisprudence of Scandinavian realists Alf Ross and Karl Olivecrona was simultaneously simple and radical: they wanted to rid our thinking about law of all the mystifying references to abstract concepts and metaphysical entities. This paper offers a critical overview of Ross's and Olivecrona's views on legal rights, while also summarizing the critiques of those views (e.g., by H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz).
Recommended Citation
Brian H. Bix, Ross and Olivecrona on Rights, 34 Austl. J. Leg. Phil. 103 (2009), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/211.
