the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 416 dish jurists and legal scholars played important roles. Swedish legal culture in the seventeenth century found its transfers in the Dutch legal culture to a great extent. Those influences were, of course, very much related to the young republic and its political position within the European geopolitical situation in the decades around 1600. This period was also characterized by a new legal doctrine articulated by the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius (1583 – 1645), who constructed a rational natural law within a dominating Christian context. Grotius was a student at the University of Leiden, one of the most prestigious universities in protestant Europe, and then practiced as a lawyer in The Hague. In this position, one of his early publications in 1609 was the very influential pamphlet, Mare Liberum, on the free sea, arguing that the open sea (the oceans) were international territory and free for all nations to use for seafaring trade. Duncan Kennedy’s large-scale meta-model, however, also fits well into the processes of internationalization in early modern times. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought quite revolutionary new perspectives for the law of European rulers. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 –1527), Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) and Jean Bodin (1530 – 1596) all introduced important political views on the sovereignty of the law and the role of the king in the territorial nation-state, and the Spanish late scholastics confirmed the fundaments for not only the upcoming rational natural law but also for early modern international public law of the seventeenth century as demonstrated by Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf (1632 –1694). The humanists supplied historical arguments for the application of Roman law, and the supreme courts developed professional and well-educated judiciaries in what has been called the judicial or juridical revolution.1179 The professionalization of the supreme courts in Europe around 1500 initiated the judicial revolution, with its best examples in the German Empire, France and Flanders. Sweden, albeit located on the periphery of the European legal development, also became involved in this Europeanization of legal culture. This process, however, was slower in the Nordic countries and, as this book has demonstrated, the Swedish legal culture deviated in several respects from the more general European development. The Swedish aspired to be a European great power, starting with the expand1179 Wijffels, Alain 2013.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=