nical system- Instead, Nääv shows how political demands are selectively absorbed, reformulated, and constrained by legal discourse. Thus, the archive enables Nääv to reconstruct a legal material that illustrates gradual consolidation of a certain legal-political order – how certainstructural biases in lawmaking, especially the dominance of formal “equal treatment”, emerged, not through a single decision, but through layered, incremental shifts over decades.33 Johansen’s constructed archive also shows how change happens in law, but it is a different type of change than what Nääv traces in that it consists primarily of legal scholarship, especially focusing on how certain concepts likeärende (procedure), beslut (decision), myndighetsutövning(exercise of public authority), andfaktisk verksamhet (concrete activity) have been developed and categorized in Swedish administrative law. What he shows is not primarily political change, but rather conceptual and methodological changewithinthe legal tradition itself – even if that change has political significance. Specifically, he traces how certain key distinctions – especially between administrative procedure (ärendehandläggning) and concrete activity (faktisk verksamhet) – were constructed, stabilized, and reified over time within legal scholarship. And in this, he tries to show how the dominant legal understanding of public administration came to focus increasingly on decision-making (cases, formal acts) and marginalized the understanding of administration as ongoing activity.34 So, it is an archive that shows how the internal structure of legal knowledge changed – becoming more formalized, abstract, and detached from the messy practical realities of administrative work. This insight resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s broader critique of modern governance, in which law increasingly operates through administrative activity and exception rather than formal decisions, a critique that Johansen refers to in the first chapter of his thesis. Through his archive, 113 petter danckwardt 33 See especially ibid, p.271 ff. 34 Johansen, Förvaltning som verksamhet: bidrag till offentligrättens allmänna läror (above, note 10), Chapter 2; 197: “[…] the preceding examination [in Chapter 2] of administrative law doctrine shows that administrative law has limited itself to identifying its main object as the case, the decision, and the exercise of public authority. In this legal focus, the decision has been regarded as the core and the norm within administrative law. This focus is shared by administrative legal scholarship both with its sister disciplines within legal science and with administrative law as a practical activity outside the academic context.” My translation.
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