RS 29

legal culture as a tool for legal analysis legal conflict, or that Norwegian national legislation conflicts with the European Convention on Human Rights, calls for harmonization when applying the law. In an analysis, such overlaps must be studied as the reason for the differences, if only to bring out the nuances. No culture is logical and systematic. Each is formed in the interaction of many individuals over a long period with the aim of many things, except making a culture. This is not unique to the law, of course. Even in countries with a code of law, the content is still a product of the efforts of different institutions and individuals over a long period. The difference is that the aim is to make law, and to make it logical and systematic, since that promotes such fundamental legal values as predictability and equality before the law. Lack of logic and system are hence found in all law, but are unintended, and combated when detected. Legal culture might be coherent and systematic, but also not. For instance, an important trait of the Norwegian legal culture is an active parliament capable of producing statutes and amending the constitution of 1814. Norway shares this with the other Nordic countries. However, Norway has also active courts, reviewing parliamentary statutes and administrative decisions since 1821 and 1818 respectively.11 The right to review is today also a shared part of the legal culture of all the Nordic countries. However, the Norwegian tradition is far older and stronger. There are explanations for this, but no logical reason; it just happened because of the specific interplay of factors found in Norway. Legal culture results from factors like politics and institutional facts, but also of factors that are hard – and at times impossible – to detect and explain.12 This is no different to the long a (à) in Old Norse (mediaeval Norwegian) developed intoåin fifteenth-century Norway, but auin Iceland and Hardanger, Voss, and parts of Sogn in Norway, andae or åe in the Faeroe Islands. Last but not least, this takes us to the question of legal cultural enzymes. Just as in a (trans)formation process studied in the natural sciences, cul11 Eirik Holmøyvik, ‘Kapittel 16. Utvilkinga av prøvingsretten i Noreg’, in Eirik Holmøyvik et al. (eds.), Lærebok i forfatningshistorie (Oslo: Pax, 2015), 334–5. 12 See themonumental work, Martin Sunnqvist, Konstitutionellt kritisk dömande: Förändring av nordiska domares attityder under två sekel, 2 vols (Stockholm: Institutet för rättshistorsk forskning, 2014). 127

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