part iv • intellectual legal history • lars björne How is it possible for two legal historians not to know of their Nordic contemporaries or predecessors, even though we are used to talking about Nordic legal systems and especially Nordic legal science as a unity? During the Cold War, textbooks on comparative law in the Western legal systems were divided into five groups: the Roman, the German, the Anglo-American, the Socialist – and the Nordic. At least in the eyes of Central European legal scholars the Nordic legal systems are all of a piece. There are five Nordic states with six languages, of which the four in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark with some effort are mutually intelligible, so there is a cultural unity of sorts. What then is this legal unity, when was it born, and how can one define it? Themediaeval legislation in the Nordic countries, except Finland, is one example. Each of the three Nordic kingdoms constituted a union of autonomous provinces with their own customary rules reflecting social and cultural values. These rules were set in writing, mainly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as provincial codes. When royal power became stronger the kings claimed the right to enact laws for the entire kingdom, a natural claim because the king was traditionally seen as the supreme judge. Norway and Sweden had laws of the realm as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, whereas Denmark, with its strong nobility and weak kings, had only provincial codes until the era of absolutist rule in the late seventeenth century. The High Middle Ages was a period of codification in other parts of Europe too, but the Nordic codes had common characteristics: no influence from Roman law or learned legal science (the Nordic countries got their first universities in the 1470s), no feudal system, and the codes were written in the vernacular, not in Latin. The Nordic codifications in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be seen as a unity, products of the absolutism in both Denmark– Norway and Sweden–Finland. The Danish–Norwegian codes, Danske Lov (1683) and Norske Lov (1687), and the Swedish Civil Code of 1734 were not scientific codifications in that sense that they were not and could not have been influenced by the Enlightenment. Unlike most other European countries, the Nordic states never had modern codifications 192
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