RS 25

such as that of reconciling contradictory opinions within the same materials, or the difficulty of how to reconcile legislative intent with objective teleological arguments, or that of how to decide when the legislative history of older statutes has become obsolete and is to be disregarded. However, I do suggest that one basic problem of legislative history is largely one of a gap between legal theory and real life statutory interpretation, which has remained unresolved since the nineteenth century. A substantial part of modern legal theory holds on to an ideal that was already a lost cause in the eighteenth century. In other words, distrust of legislative history is unmerited and should be deconstructed.Wächter’s assertion (and that of the historical school) takes the edge off all attempts to get rid of legislative history. It teaches us the futility of trying to persuade lawyers to disregard it or to persuade the legislator to refrain from producing it. After such deconstruction it remains to be explained, for instance, why legislative history has acquired such a huge importance in the Nordic countries, which by all standards is a deviation. It has been suggested that this issue is only a question of legislative technique.26 This may well be the case.Anyone with the preconception that legislative history consists solely of political documents, written by politicians for politicians, will be surprised by the special Nordic style of legislative history, obviously written with the clear intention of being employed by lawyers and judges. If Nordic legislators had decided at some point, perhaps in the nineteenth century, that it might just be a good idea to keep legal provisions short and to provide further factual and political background information and technical, legal explanations and suggestions of interpretation in the proposition submitted to parliament, the roots of this phenomenon would be worth investigating. Considering the fact that legislative activity today is daily growing more intense, while at the same time judges are being urged to keep proceedings and lawsuits brief and to the point, good legislative history should be considered to be an advantage. I firmly believe that the Nordic style of legislative history could be the way of the future for any legal order, even an export commodity, and not - as stated by Swedish EU law experts, Justice Scalia and legal scholars such as Robert Summers - past tense. r i chard nordqu i st 211 26 S. Strömholm, Legislative material and construction of statutes, Scandinavian Studies of Law, vol. 10, Stockholm1966.

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