The Need for Systematisation
Legal order is a normative totality consisting of rules and principles. As such a totality, it has a double function. First, it gives citizens patterns of behaviour (primary norms), and second, the legal order gives the authorities the basis on which to solve the conflicts between the citizens, or between the citizens and the public power (secondary norms).
Legal order is, to some extent, a pre-systemised unit that consists of a collection of statutes concerning legal phenomena, like contracts, obligations, companies, crimes and legal procedure - e.g. the Finnish Decedent’s Estate Act, which is divided into chapters, sections and articles.Compared with legal order, the legal system is a meta-level unit reformulated by DSL, and only by it. The courts and administrative authorities do not have the task of systematising the legal order; they either solve singular cases or take care of the administration. There are, however, many good reasons why the pre-systematised units have to be reformulated:
1. Reformulation would produce a survey of the mass of legal norms. In modern societies, there are such a huge number of valid legal norms that the use of a pre-systematised unit would be impossible in practice. It would simply take too much time to identify those norms applicable to the case.
2. Reformulation is also ideal for the economy of legal thought. Well executed systematisation saves time and energy, and it is not necessary to reformulate the normative unit separately every time a certain part of the legal order has to be applied.
3. The value of systematisation is also in the preciseness of thinking. A functioning reformulation is like a well-polished lens through which the lawyer looks at the normative unit. The preciseness of legal thinking makes it possible to identify the proper questions to be solved, as well the interpretative alternations for the final decision or recommendation.
The lens metaphor elucidates both the strong and weak side of systematisation. The lens allows us to see clearly only that which hits the field of view. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, we cannot think what is impossible to think - i.e., we cannot go outside our thinking. This is also the case in every legal systematisation. They are the limits of thinking, and we cannot even put questions that are beyond the scope of that special reformulation.
The strength of systematisation is in the richness of the questions. The richness may be found in the more exact way to identify the problems, but also in the range of interpretation alternatives. As we will see later on, the more exact our thinking, and/or the larger the net of alternatives, the richer our thinking.