the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 404 substitute system should be abolished and a judge learned in the law should chair every lower court in Sweden. This reform was made possible by founding law faculties at the universities not only at Uppsala, but also at Turku (Finland), Dorpat (Livonia), Greifswald (Pomerania) and Lund (Scania); faculties which all produced civil servants, judges and lawyers for the Swedish court system. As Mia Korpiola points out in her texts, the Svea Court of Appeal was created at a time of both political and legal chaos. War with Russia was combined with internal governmental conflicts. Chaos in the judiciary’s observance of a proper court hierarchy contributed to this severe situation. The new high court was not at all looked upon as an appellate court to begin with, but as a royal court in a long tradition, as also shown by Martin Sunnqvist in his article on the high court seals from the middle of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. When Gustav II Adolf signed the mandate for his Royal Court at Stockholm, located at the Castle of Stockholm, known as “Three Crowns” (Tre Kronor), his intention may have been to create a royal court on European models. The aim of this new court, however, should also be to implement delegated royal jurisdiction within a Swedish tradition. The aim of this volume is to try to explain the positions of the Swedish appellate courts in the seventeenth century from the creation of this court in 1614 and up to the period of Swedish autocracy from about 1680. It tries to provide new perspectives on the supreme and appellate jurisdiction in Sweden during this period. During the Middle Ages there already were tendencies to both legal fragmentation and coherence. During the period discussed here (1614 – 1680), openness to reception of foreign law prevailed. There were several reasons for such an attitude. One of the most important was the desperate need for legal reform. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, all judges in Sweden had to use legal manuscripts. After an unsuccessful attempt at legal reform, however, King Charles IX(de facto r. 1599 – 1611) decided to print the medieval laws, despite their being obsolete to a great extent, in order to provide a homogenous text for the judges to rely on. The Concept of Judicial Revolution in the Swedish Context
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