part iv • intellectual legal history • søren koch were aware of their creative contribution. This marks the essential difference between mere collecting and compiling. Compiling always has an element of creativity and originality. Even if we today might struggle to understand the underlying logic and purpose, these works shaped legal practice, and thus helped change the Danish-Norwegian legal culture. It remains to be seen what a systematic, qualitative analysis might tell us about their choice of materials and how to present the legislative material. The results might also help to understand whether they furthered, or at times even obstructed, the dissemination of legal knowledge, for example when a compiler accidently or deliberately overlooked relevant legislative material. Compiling legislative material can thus also be regarded a way of creating a legal canon.110 Collections of case notes may be regarded a third area where compilation was an important technique in helping to establish legal authorities and building a canon of law. In Denmark and Norway we have traces of case law recognized as a source of law in the oldest law books, and know of many often unsystematic collections of legal decisions that were in circulation from late mediaeval times.111 However, in the second half of the seventeenth century the official ideology of absolutism gained ground in Denmark–Norway. Law was now regarded the prerogative of the sovereign, meaning the king. His will expressed in the form of legislation became the only normative foundation of law. Consequently, case law was no longer regarded a source of law.112 Solicitors were even banned from referring to former case law in the Supreme Court in Copenhagen.113 Despite all the political efforts to reduce the importance of case law, be110 The connection between codification and canonization has been emphasized by Raymond Westbrook, ‘Codification and Canonization,’ in id. et al. (eds.), Ex Oriente Lex: Near Eastern Influences on Ancient Greek and Roman Law(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 181–93, though he includes expressly compiled works. 111 Sunde 2010, 89. 112 See Norwegian Code 1687 Book 1Chapter 1 Art. 2 in conjunction with Art. 4. 113 Björne 1995, 47. 226 Compiling case notes
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