courthouses was not established in Sweden until the late nineteenth century.2 The premises of the court, enclosing the trial, demanded an architecture principally intended to fill different and often varying needs. Many rural courts simply moved from one building or village to another according to practical requirements and availability, a solution shared by other European courts of first instance.3 However, there was an important difference between urban and rural districts: while the smaller Swedish town courts met in dedicated town halls, which usually served as multifunctional public establishments including the political centre, lthoughthe civil code of 1734 stated that all rural härad, or judicial districts, were to build acourthouse, the practice of dedicated A part ii • legal cultures 1 Luke Scott, ‘Court:The Place of Law and the Space of the City’, ARENA Journal of Architectural Research1/1 (2016), 5. 2 Eva Löfgren,Rummet och rätten: Tingshus som föreställning, byggnad och rum i användning 1734– 1970(diss., Gothenburg: Göteborgs universitet, 2011). 3 Clare Graham, Ordering Law The Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to 1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Linda Mulcahy, Legal architecture: Justice, due process and the place of law(Abingdon:Routledge, 2011); Association française pour l’histoire de la justice, La justice en ses temples: Regards sur l’architecture judiciaire en France, pref. R. Badinter (Paris: Éditions Errance, 1992 & Poitiers: Brissaud, 1992); Peter Garde (ed.), Danmarks tinghuse (Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundet, 2006); Klemens Klemmer, Rudolf Wassermann & Thomas M. Wessel, Deutsche Gerichtsgebäude: Von der Dorflinde über den Justizpalats zum Haus des Rechts (Munich: Beck, 1993). 142 A spatial history of Swedish rural courts 8. Eva Löfgren Court, from the Latincohors, is an enclosed space. The question as to the architecture of this space is a question as to what encloses the space within which trials take place.1
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