constitutions and codifications, 1667–2017 what different story, but still showed the connections between great politics, political necessity, and the ambitions for legal reform; think only of warlike new states such as Prussia, Austria, and France and her satellite states, and their eagerness to define law in new ways. Legal history can inform, indeed it must inform, legal science about the social and political preconditions of these legal tools. Samuel Pufendorf is a towering figure in the prehistory of codification, and for that fact alone the Lund faculty of law has its place in that history. Pufendorf ’s major achievement was to understand natural law as a legal entity in its own right, and thereby define natural law in the postReformation era as transcending religion, transcending new political regions, and outdoing customary legal traditions.16 De Jure Naturae et Gentiumof 1672 outlined the systematic idea, the material content, and not least the ideological possibility of what seemed impossible, and might even be impossible – namely to establish a common, universal law in all legal branches. Without Pufendorf ’s immense influence, documented in much recent scholarship, combined with his ideas of political action and insight into the nature of law, the later codifications might not have come about. This is not the place for the whole story, but we can still take in its contours. How did this new theoretical yet practical approach to codification affect the Nordic countries? The new ideas, it was hoped, would transform the Nordic law codes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries into new, modern ones. The debates had started before 1800, and while Prussia, Austria, and not least France enacted their central codifications between 1794 and 1814, the Nordic countries set the process in motion. 16 See Kjell Å. Modéer (ed.), Samuel von Pufendorf 1632–1982: Ett rättshistoriskt symposium i Lund, 15–16 januari 1982 (Stockholm: Institutet för Rättshistorisk Forskning, 1986); Timothy Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). 335 Constitutions and codifications, 1667–2017
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