legal culture as a tool for legal analysis shapes people’s ideas and expectations of the law. Where does this leave our brief survey of judicial review in Norwegian law? Let us deal with the four settings for interaction in reverse order, starting with nature before movingonto institutions, history, andthepeople we share the world with. Norway is a vast country. The distance from the capital, Oslo, to the northernmost city equals the distance fromOslo to Vienna. Norway also has a small population. There is no north–south railway, and before flying became common in the 1980s it was time-consuming to travel any distance. When the Code of 1274 stated that courts could abandon law without the permission of the sovereign, this was an ideological choice; however, it was also a practical choice, since Norway was even harder on travellers then. Ships could only sail in the spring from the far north, and had to return in the autumn or wait for the following spring. The strong independence of the judiciary from central power was thus partly a question of being able to govern despite the geographical distances. The code of 1274 was issued when Norwegian central power was at its strongest. From 1319 until 1814, important, and at times all, central institutions of government were either in Sweden or in Denmark, because Norway was part of a sequence of political unions. The most important governing institutions on Norwegian soil in this period were the courts. Until the eighteenth century they had key political functions alongside their judicial functions. This contributed to a strong judiciary. With the establishment of central political and democratic institutions in Norway proper in 1814 and the efforts to improve communications across the country, the strong position enjoyed by the judiciary could have changed. The role of the courts was indeed in flux for some decades after 1814.44 The push to lessen the courts’ hold was not sufficient to overcome the effect of path dependency. 139 Nature Institutions History
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