part iv • intellectual legal history • lars björne I got my chair in 1979 and continued with my comparative studies, especially about German influence on Finnish legal doctrine; a contributory factor was the very generous scholarships of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Igot agrant for research at the University of Munich in the academic year 1982–1983 and started work on the systematics used in German textbooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The resultant study was published in the Münchner Universitätsschriften series as Deutsche Rechtssysteme im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert in 1984. My visit to Oslo in the summer 1980 had been a revelation, though. I had at least a basic knowledge of the law and legal science in Sweden, but I found in Oslo two Nordic legal systems I knew nothing about, both of them similar but still different compared to the legal system in Finland. I tried to find some comparative research on the legal systems in the Nordic countries, but to my astonishment could not find any. Which was why I extended my research on systematics to all Nordic countries, and I published a second monograph, Nordische Rechtssysteme, in Munich in 1987 – a short history of Nordic legal science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The two books were intended for a German audience. In the late 1980s, Mauritz Bäärnhielm, who was chair of the Swedish Olin Foundation for Legal History, mentioned the possibility of publishing treaties in the foundation’s own series. I had previously written in Finnish or German, but now I chose to write in Swedish for a Nordic audience, having already decided towrite a comprehensive survey of Nordic legal science from its beginnings in the sixteenth century to the 1950s. I began with a monograph, Nordisk rättskällelära, about the doctrine of legal sources in the Nordic legal literature, mainly in the nineteenth century, all while planning a history of Nordic legal science and applying for scholarships, mainly to visit the main Nordic libraries – Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, and Reykjavik (Iceland, which already had its own legal literature in the early eighteenth century, was now included). This was still the happy time before the Internet, when you could justify the need for literature studies abroad, and I got the necessary travel grant. I was already aware that the task was enormous. I decided I would need four volumes and at least sixteen years’ work to do it justice, but I did not 190
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