in law ought to be regarded as an advantage rather than to make him unqualified for solving labour disputes. In the light of the situation that many Swedish legal writers paid a rather absent-minded attention to the realities of working life, it would be tempting to conclude that legal science played a minor role in the formation of modern Swedish labour law. At the same time one can not disregard that academically trained jurists tipped the labour court’s balance. Their education was formed by legal scholars whose opinions we can study in handbooks and lecture notes. From that perspective, legal science and education received a decisive role during the formative period. How did Swedish legal scholars at that time treat the relationship between a worker and an employer? The few legal writers who analysed labour relations took contractual points of departure. Nevertheless, a majority reached the conclusion that the parties’ individual freedom of contract was, or ought to be, limited by certain pre-contractual terms which applied either due to the nature of things, established custom or some kind of connection between these foundations. Without specifically mentioning labour contracts, Ernst Viktor Nordling’s theses (1891, 1913) remind us of what Savigny had declared in the first half of the 19th century, namely, that law developed organically and was founded on a common spirit, the “Volksgeist”. Nordling held that even if legislation, precendents, legal writing and custom were all important sources of law, ultimately they were just “outflows”of the common opinion of justice. The Finno-Swedish Wilhelm Chydenius concluded (1906) from the “nature” of the new free contracts of labour that several of the ancient master-servant rules ought to be analogously applied. Among them was the workers’ far-reaching duty of obedience and loyalty. C G Björling, who wrote a legendary handbook of private law (1910, 1918, 1923, 1930), noted that the existing rules p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 310 Legal writing on labour relations 1885 -1930
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