legal compilation in early modern denmark and norway This highlights a more general problem. While the influence of legal science on law in action seems evident in most continental legal orders, particularly in Germany, in the Nordic countries such an impact is more difficult to trace.17 The lack of human and financial resources in the Nordic countries meant relatively few institutions trained learned lawyers, a shortage that had an impact on the quantity and quality of the legal literature. In addition, many Nordic scholars who wrote on the universal principles of law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (often in treatises on rational natural law) were strongly influenced by continental role models.18 They often compiled texts ascribed to very different legal cultures and which addressed audiences with different ideas and expectations of the law and its application.19 Literature on Danish and Norwegian substantive law was rare, limited to encyclopaedic or differential literature, comparing national law with particularly Roman law.20 To what extent this literature influenced practising lawyers, judges, or legislators in the Nordic countries is thus even harder to assess. The earliest attempts at systematic presentations of national legislation date to the second half of the eighteenth century. At least in Denmark and Norway it is therefore almost impossible to speak of self-sustaining legal science before the nineteenth century.21 17 For Germany, this connection has been emphasized by Jan Schröder, Recht alsWissenschaft (2nd edn, Munich: Beck, 2012). An attempt has been made for a Nordic country by Jørn Ø. Sunde, ‘Fornuft og Erfarenhed’ (diss., Bergen 2007) focusing on the impact of legal literature on court rulings in the court district of Hordaland in Norway. 18 Rolv Nøtvik Jakobsen, ‘Holberg etter Pufendorf, Gunnerus etter Dajes, Schlegel før 1814: Om autoriteter og fridom i dansk-norsk Natur og Folkerett på 1700-tallet’, in Ola Medstad (ed.), Frihetens forskole. Professor Schlegel og eidsvoldsmennenes læretid i København. (Oslo: Pax, 2013), 126–56; id., ‘Naturrett som erstatning for Bibelen som rettskjelde: Den tyske teologen Johann David Michaelis’ bidrag til moderniseringa av lovverket i dei skandinaviske kongedøma’, Teologisk Tidsskrift 3 (2018), 198–208. 19 By ‘legal culture’ I mean the definition by Jørn Ø. Sunde, ‘Champagne at the funeral’, in Jørn Ø. Sunde & Knut Einar Skodvin, Rendezvous of European Legal Cultures (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2010), 1 See also Sören Koch, ‘Legal Culture and Comparative Law’, in Sören Koch & Jørn Sunde, Comparing Legal Cultures (Bergen: Fagbokforlag 2020), 43 ff. 20 For example, Thomas Clitau, Overenstemmelse og Forskiæl i mellemDen Romerske og den Danske Ræt (Copenhagen: Groth, 1736); Hector Albert Reuss, Romersk-Dansk Jurisprudentz (Copenhagen: Groth, 1740). 21 Björne 1995, 8. 203
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