english summary 1083 tion of changing society through legislation, became decisive. In addition, examples from both the Weimar Republic and the United States of the Roosevelt era illustrated the tension between the claim of courts to have the competence of constitutional critical judging and the actual possibility of courts to make use of such acompetence. Constitutional critical judging thus met resistance from politicians that represented influential majorities. The cases before the courts where constitutional critical judging could be relevant were of a kind where such majorities met minorities which had not prevailed in the political process. There were some cases where rights and freedoms of a political nature were protected, but they were few. In Finland, where the entire constitutional order had been at stake, the judges could not protect the rights and freedoms of the constitution of 1919 since the constitution itself left no room for it. Overall, it can be said that the similarity between the countries, which can be identified in the 1920s and 1930s, was not the outcome of previous similarities. The intensity of constitutional critical judging declined in Norway and Finland and increased in Sweden and Denmark, and all countries ended up at about the same level. In the period hereafter, two different lines of development can be distinguished. The differences that I have described have been differences in degree: in the attitudes in judging, in the inspiration of the doctrine. But the differences also successively became clearer, with the Norwegian judgments in 1866 and 1890 as important examples that the Norwegian judges could adopt a different attitude than the Swedish and Danish. The Norwegian judges had a culture of constitutional critical judging to build on, whilst judges in Denmark, Sweden and Finland now had to identify the historical building blocks of such a culture. In Finland there was of course such a culture of judging, but it had arisen in a particular context, different from the conditions that prevailed after 1919. There are some important differences between Norway and the other countries after the 1930s: In 1940, the justices of the Norwegian Supreme Court laid down their offices with the right to judicial review as a reason, a right which the occupying power denied the court. During the settlement after the occupation, the court related to principles of international law. In the 1960s, the justices showed an openness to the application of international The one line of development after 1930: Constitutional critical judging on old foundations
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