Social Tools and Legal Gears: Hägerström on the Nature of Law

One of the most renowned ideas of Scandinavian legal realism (SLR) is that the law is like a machine. This paper examines the figure of speech on the basis of the understanding that metaphors are conceptual maps that go from a less abstract or complex source dominion (e.g. the machine) to a target dominion of increased complexity or abstractness (e.g. the legal system). I distinguish, in the first section, various referents in the source dominion, namely different machines, so as to outline a reading that historically makes sense and that does not treat just any tool as a machine. In the second section, I list different meanings of the metaphor in its specific relation to law, the target dominion. By looking at both the source and the target dominion, I stress the terms in which Hägerström applied the metaphor, to better understand the limits of validity in the figure of speech. My aim is to grasp what features of the legal system the metaphor enables us to highlight.