cent of the selected jurists answered that they made daily use of editions of statute law.4 94.5percent of jurists stated that they consult editions of statute law once a week and53.0percent said that they consult the authoritative text once a week.5 If the statistics are to be trusted, Swedish jurists seem, in absolute terms, to make use of private or official editions of statute law at least five times a week.6 No other source of law comes close to statutory law as far as frequency of use is concerned. The striking dominance of statutory law is, as such, unsurprising. Statutes are without doubt the supreme source of Swedish law, a direct consequence of the principles of popular sovereignty, representative democracy and parliamentarism laid down in the Swedish Constitution. In this sense, the civil law mould would seem to fit Swedish legal tradition like a glove. It is nonetheless worth pointing out that Sweden – as opposed to more hard-core civil law countries like France or Germany – has firmly and repeatedly rejected the notion of a private law codification. In fact, Sweden belongs to a rather exclusive group of countries within the civil-law traditions, namely the Nordic legal family, that seem to defy the taxonomy of comparative law. Instead of adopting a comprehensive and structured code, the Swedish Parliament has opted for ad hoc-legislation as the preferred political tool. This peculiarity of the Nordic legal tradition, along with the importance attributed to case law in the Nordic countries, seems to indicate a certain theoretical kinship with the common-law tradition. It could be argued that an English lawyer would feel more at home with Swedish statute law than, for instance, a French jurist – the argument being that the marked similarities in scope and character between Swedish and English statute law in practice outweigh the differences. Despite this reservation, Swedish law is part, albeit an atypical part, of the civil law tradition.There is therefore no reason to doubt the data so far: Statutes are by far the most important source of law in Sweden.7 Whereas the statistics that verify the primacy of statute law are easy to trust, the runner-up is actually a good reason to doubt the validity of the studies.According to the statistics, only one source of law other mar i e sand st röm 297 4 Ibidem, p 596. 5 Ibidem. 6 Ibidemp 597. 7 See Sandström,Marie,The Swedish Model –Three Aspects of Legal Methodology inLiber Amicorum. Festschrift in Honour of CsabaVarga, Budapest 2007, pp297 – 304.
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