part iv • intellectual legal history • søren koch Norway’s statutory law will only be available online. This is a considerable change of format, which in turn might affect the way legislation and other legal sources are perceived and applied. A change as radical as the transition from handwritten manuscripts to print in the early modern period?13 There are indications that such is the case. Yet the impact of compilations on the development of national legal culture and legal scholarship has been underexplored. There has been no attempt to investigate the function and impact of legal compilations systematically or comparatively, perhaps because of an intellectual bias against compilation stemming from the Enlightenment, with its glorification of original authorship.14 Even the term ‘compilation’ has negative connotations, deriving as it does from the Latincompilare, to plunder or plagiarize. Nevertheless, the lack of a contextual understanding of compilation is a fundamental lacuna in our understanding of the intellectual history of Nordic law The intellectual history of law has traditionally been equated with the history of legal science.15 By collecting, categorizing, and contextualizing individual contributions, legal historians such as Sten Gagnér, Lars Björne, Ditlev Tamm, Marie Sandström, and many more have deeply enriched our knowledge regarding the internal dynamics in the Nordic legal scientific discourse and its intellectual foundations.16 To describe the impact legal science had on the intellectual preconditions for theapplication of law, on the other hand, was not their primary goal. 13 Eisenstein 1997, 57. 14 See for example, Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) 141–160. 15 Stefan Collini, What is intellectual history?, History Today 35 (2014), 10. 16 Sten Gagnér, Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Gesetzgebung (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960); Lars Björne, Patrioter och Institutionalister: Den nordiska rättsvetenskapens historia, i (Stockholm: Nerenius & Santerus, 1995); Ditlev Tamm, Retsvidenskaben i Danmark: En historisk oversikt (Copenhagen: DJØF, 1992); Marie Sandström, Die Herrschaft der Rechtswissenschaft (Stockholm: Nordiska, 1989). 202 Intellectual legal history
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