part iii • contemporary legal history • mats kumlien political chasm, and the tug of war between law and politics emerged even more clearly. At the Swedish universities, graduate scholars were well connected to Germany, especially before 1933. By a Swedish Verwissenschaftlichung, a ‘general part’ was elaborated by the interaction of legislators, the judges at the Supreme Administrative Court established in 1909, and the law professors. It is worth pausing to look at two of these scholars, namely Sundberg and Herlitz. Halvar G. F. Sundberg was professor of administrative law in Uppsala (1941–1961) and the father of Swedish municipal law (kommunalrätt). When elaborating the ‘general principles’, he used a pluralistic method: hemight refer to decisions by the Supreme Administrative Court, for example, the right to appeal, local communities’ competence, rules on procedure and voting. He also paid due notice of the fact that the Book of Judicial Procedure (Rättegångsbalken) in the Code of 1734 could be applied analogouslyby administrative authorities. However, surprisingly often he used his own creativity. Thus he generalized from particular acts such as the Poor Law, or he argued that ‘it should be considered’ that a public authority should follow a principle, that a principle was ‘enclosed’ in some of the constitution’s paragraphs, that it was a ‘consequence’ of some other principle, or ‘corresponded’ to it. Moreover, in order to elaborate the general part of the twentieth century’s Swedish administrative law he did not hesitate to invoke ordinances from the eighteenth century or Olaus Petri’s ‘Rules for Judges’ from the sixteenth century, which emanated from Roman and canon law.11 Sundberg’s aim was to protect the citizen from the state. Consequently, he strongly supported the idea that the general part included the individual’s right to appeal against decisions made by public authorities, and that the appeal should be heard in a court, maybe even a general court, as in common law systems. A somewhat different view was expressed by Nils Herlitz, professor of administrative law in Stockholm (1927–1955). He accepted there was a 11 Halvar G. F. Sundberg, Kommunalrätt: Allmänna delen(Stockholm: Norstedt, 1936), 239; id., Grunddragen av allmän förvaltningsrätt (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1943), 47, 64–5, 69–71; Kumlien 2019, 238–40. 182
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