nordic legal science: diversity and unity To illustrate what ‘Nordic’ means I will end with a story about a symposium in the Finnish Supreme Court, which I attended in October 2017. Jørn Sunde from Bergen gave a lecture on ‘What is a Nordic supreme court?’ Afterwards the only non-Nordic participant, Alain Wijffels from Belgium, asked what we then mean by ‘Nordic’. Is it the same as ‘Scandinavian’? Are the Baltic countries ‘Nordic’ too? The answer to both questions was no, and the chair of the session, Heikki Pihlajamäki, set about explaining the Nordic legal systems and legal science with much the same arguments I have used here. Wijffels was still doubtful, but finally Timo Esko, the President of the Supreme Court, gave the conclusive definition of ‘Nordic’. He had observed that at international conferences with many hundreds of participants, if there were one Dane, one Finn, one Norwegian, and one Swede and they accidentally found one another, they would stick together for the rest of the conference. 197 LEGAL HI STORY Reflecting the past and the present, current perspectives for the future
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