constitutional critical judging 1080 a juridical person seems to have been no obstacle for applying them to the Finnish or Swedish constitution, where the monarchical principle did not apply and the King and the Estates were equal. The American approach was not unknown to e.g. Christian Naumann. However, the American influence, which had been initiated by Tocqueville and Story, made a stronger impact through P. C. Lasson and T. H. Aschehoug in Norway and Henning Matzen in Denmark. This impact was of another kind than the German. What was important was not the theoretical construction but the experience that power must be limited. The crucial issue here was whether the constitution could be considered superior to other norms and whether there were provisions in the constitutions that could be construed as limitations on the legislative power. If the constitution was lex superior, and the organs of state arranged side by side, questions such as the meaning of promulgation did not arise. On the other hand, other questions arose such as who was the final interpreter of the constitution. Norway differed at this time from Denmark in respect of the interaction of legal doctrine, case-law, and the legitimization of judicial review through references to American law. Henning Matzen, however, put forward the important argument that the special procedure for constitutional amendment would be meaningless if also unconstitutional statutes should be applied. Placing the constitution on a superior level was not difficult in the Nordic countries using this argument; it was actually easier than pressing the Nordic constitutions into the monarchical principle or the constitutional legal positivism. The fact that the international inspiration came from different sources in the legal systems of Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway was not due to a lack of knowledge. Scholars such as Christian Naumann and Johannes Nellemann used the American system – which was known also in Germany in the 1860s through Robert von Mohl – as a contrast. On the other hand, P. C. Lasson and T. H. Aschehoug used the German theory as a contrast. The overall impression is that the choice of inspiration has a broader legal cultural explanation, of which the inspiration in constitutional law was only a part. Nonetheless the difference between the different countries’ understandings is one of degree rather than kind. From the 1880s, new attitudes were expressed in case-law. In Sweden, there are some examples that courts set aside municipal regulations if they were How did constitutional critical judging in the Nordic countries around 1900 differ?
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