sed like a nineteenth-century gentleman. The plaque announced him to be Schweigaard, but I had no notion of who the man was. Only later did I learn that Anton Martin Schweigaard (1808–1870) was the most famous legal scholar in Norway in the nineteenth century, and an influential politician too. I used my two months in Oslo to read reams of Norwegian and Danish legal and political history, and I wrote a short textbook in Finnish about the legal history of these countries, which I later inflicted on my students in my home faculty at the University of Turku in Finland. I studied law at the University of Turku and in the 1970s did my doctoral dissertation on the political trials of communists and socialists in the Court of Appeal of Turku in 1918 to 1939, which was still very much a controversial topic. At the same time I wrote a second monograph on German influences on the Finnish doctrine of private law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to acquire the qualification required for a chair in legal history. It was a comparative study typical of that time in Finland: you took a pile of books about the domestic legal system, another pile about a foreign legal system, usually the German one, and compared them to prove the presumed influence. henI first visited the University of Oslo in the summer of 1980, from my office window I could see a huge statue of a man dres- W part iv • intellectual legal history 188 Nordic legal science: Diversity and unity 12. Lars Björne
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