Schmidt asks what was the cause for the oversight of the workers around 1930 to call attention to the alternatives and arguments that legal history provided.Was this because of polemical eagerness for the thesis that was the mirror image of the employers’, or was it quite simply because of a lack of a thorough investigation of the background? Anyhow, if the Social Democrats’ approach was tactics, it was executed with an impressive intensity and consequence. Second, to what extent did this integration meanself-regulation? The legislation of 1928 did not regulate the terms of the contract of employment. Sweden instead relied on the corporativist system, according to which the state functioned in symbiosis with the big interest organisations.An important and concrete part of labour law making was delegated to the representatives of the groups concerned. This method was aimed at promoting the legitimacy of the new labour law at the same time as it supplied the parties with an arena for negotiations and compromises.The state intervened through legislation; the court’s decisions, however, were aimed at appearing as results of co-operation, rather than confrontation.This phenomenon has been observed in sociological literature as “reflexive law”. Instead of regulating the substance of the law, the legislature regulated the relationships of competence between different societal subsystems, including their institutional structures and forms of decision-making.602 The establishment of the Swedish Labour Court in1928 marked merely the last link but one in a long chain of legal political shifts. The last link was to be the decisions of the court, which started its work in January 1929. However, and this is a crucial point, in the most important institution of “reflexive” Swedish labour law, the role to tip the balance was entrusted to “professional” jurists. The court’s first president Arthur Lindhagen, who was educated at the Faculty of Law in Uppsala and the Svea Court of Appeal, p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 322 602 Teubner 1983, pp. 239-285; Malmberg 1997, pp. 46-47.
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