entangled in insolvency – jussi sallila 265 tween dogmatic and pragmatic types of bankruptcy law.717 Without a detailed study of the history of doctrine and procedure, early forms of insolvency management may appear more modern than they actually were. For much of the seventeenth century, the process of integrating diverse procedures was far from complete in Sweden. There is also a more general reason why it is interesting to reassess Jägerskiöld’s account of the development of Swedish bankruptcy law. It was his explicit aim to demonstrate that Roman law and contemporary Roman-German and Roman-Dutch law had had a major influence in the development of Swedish law. Such influence had been doubted or denied by earlier scholars whose inclination to downplay foreign influences was linked to their nationalist conception of history and legal history.718 Writing in the decades following World War II, Jägerskiöld joined the wider movement of European legal history and concluded that “[t]he Swedish development, not unnaturally, turns out to be part of the general European evolution. Like the latter, our legal civilization is founded on the Roman heritage.” The most recent appraisal of Jägerskiöld’s thesis has been made by Elsa Trolle Önnerfors in her study of the seventeenth-century testament cases of the Svea Court of Appeal. Her conclusion is that Jägerskiöld exaggerated the importance of Roman law in Sweden. While the learned Roman law terminology was used by the judges and advocates, the argumentation was centred upon domestic law, and the foreign terms were often given a new meaning relevant to Swedish circumstances. Roman law concepts thus contributed to the changes in the interpretation of old Swedish law, but did not fundamentally transform it.719 At a more general level, the continuity of the national legal culture is at odds with the Europeanization thesis emphasizing the common legal heritage. In this chapter, it is argued that the emergence of bankruptcy legislation in Sweden in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Sweden can also be seen as an example of Swedish exceptionalism. In an article published in 1874, Robert Montgomery stressed that the 1687 resolution720 that regulated important aspects of bankruptcy, was an early example of 717 Forster, Wolfgang 2009 pp. 1-2, 363-365. 718 In Jägerskiöld, Stig 1967a pp. 177-179, the conclusions of the major works are summarized in English. For Jägerskiöld’s review of previous literature, see Jägerskiöld, Stig 1963 pp. 25-29. 719 Trolle Önnerfors, Elsa 2010 pp. 286, 294-295. 720 Kongl. May:tz Resolution och Förklaring öfver Lagsens rätte Förstånd uti åtskillige
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=