Robert Feenstra It celebrated recently also its fiftieth birthday and this year it is exactly fifty years ago that I started my career as a visitor of international congresses by attending its second meeting in Brussels. Eleven years ago it held its fortieth meeting in Stockholm, on the invitation of the Olin Foundation. After mentioning these international links with our hosts today I may take the opportunity of insisting on some special thoughts that come to a Dutchman visiting Stockholm and its Riddarhuset. In the history of the building where we gather today a Dutch architect, Vingboons, played a crucial role in the 1650’s, as I learned fromthe beautiful little booklet that was given us this morning. One of the illustrations of this guide caught my special attention; the coat of arms of count Gustaf Gustafsson af Wasaborg. He was the son of king Gustave II Adolph and a Dutch girl, Margareta Cabeljauw(a name which in Dutch means codfish). The guide mentions that she was the daughter of a Dutch merchant in Göteborg. I would like to add that she was the sister of the first professor of law at Amsterdam, Joannes Cabeljauw. He taught from1640 to 1645 at the vaurncipA Athenaeum Illustre, the predecessor of the University where I did my own law studies. I must add, however, that his teaching was not a success: he was dismissed because he did not prepare his lectures sufficiently so that sometimes there was not one student in his classroom. Let me end, however, with a more illustrious link between Sweden and the Netherlands: Hugo Grotius, who in the second half of his exile from his fatherland was, for ten years, the Swedish ambassador in Paris. As a good ambassador he took much trouble to prove that at the French court the king of Sweden should have precedence over other Western kings such as those of Spain and England. In this context he emphasized the merits of the original inhabitants of Sweden and their descendants: the Goths (Visigoths and Ostrogoths), the Vandals and the Lombards. In the prolegomena ol his Historia Gotthorum, Vandalorum et Langohardorum he discussed in particular the records of their oldest laws and even went as far as to argue in detail that a number of their legal institutions — of public and of private law - were better than those of Roman law. I would seem most appropriate to recommend the reading of this first comparative treatise on Roman law and Nordic law to the participants in the present Symposiumon Swedish Legal History in an International Context and in particular to our host, the Board of the Olin Foundation, whose impressive series of publications would have delighted its author, the generis humani iurisconsultus. 322
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