summary ties concerned prevailed. In addition to this, there was the control exercised by the Parliamentary Ombudsman and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Military Affairs. Legal protection was also bolstered by citizens having access to the public administration’s decisions thanks to the principle of public access to official information. Herlitz was inclined to present historical explanations. The so-called learned law did not have the same influence in Sweden as in the absolutist States of Continental Europe. Sweden had never been feudal and the free individuals had participated in the direct democracy of local communities from an early stage. The task of municipal self-government was not primarily to comply with the directives of the central powers, but to raise individuals to become responsible citizens, which may sound like an echo not only from Robert von Mohl and Lorenz von Stein in the 19th century but also from Matthias Theodor Rabenius. Herlitz drew the conclusion from his historical argument that the Swedish legal tradition was ‘proximate to the people’ in quite a different way than in Denmark and Norway. This view was also shared by others within Swedish administrative law. One of them was Halvar G. F. Fredrik Sundberg in Uppsala. He had succeeded Reuterskiöld in 1935 only to leave the professorship in 1936, apply again and be appointed in 1939, immediately resign, apply yet again and be appointed as professor in the same office in 1941. He finally definitively resigned when he retired in 1961. The background to these complicated twists and turns was that Sundberg was not permitted to combine the professorship in Uppsala with his post as Commissioner of the Finance Department of the Stockholm City Administration. The situation in Uppsala stabilised after he took on the professorship in 1942 for the third and last time. This does not mean that things settled down. Sundberg was the first professor of administrative law in Sweden who had publicly defended their doctoral thesis in the subject. He may be deemed to be the undisputable father of Swedish local government law, or at least the deliverer, although Rabenius, Rydin, Blomberg and Reuterskiöld had made ambitious moves in this field. A ‘general part’ of local 281
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