the national legal systems. In Sweden we departed from a monolithic legal system dictated by the national government and parliament. The new Swedish constitution adopted in 1974 also marked a shift from applying a separation of power’s doctrine to the sovereignty principle. The primary source for the Swedish judiciary in those days were the political legislative drafts. And twenty years later that modern doctrine was challenged, abolished, and replaced by decisions of supranational courts in Luxemburg and Strasbourg. As the former chief justice of the Swedish supreme court Marianne Lundius stated, “The Supreme Court is no longer the Supreme”.26 EU membership has initiated revisions of the constitutions in several countries, including Sweden, where the new international context resulted in a turn back to more autonomous courts and to Montesquieu’s separation of powers due to the Basic Law 2008/2011. The former president of the Svea Court of Appeal Johan Hirschfeldt has been an active supporter of the rule of law and judicial independence, contributing substantially to this constitutional reform.27 Today these changes back to historical constitutional principles regarding the courts and judiciaries are regarded as mainstream legal doctrine within European legal culture and legal scholarship. But how does this shift relate to an eventual turn to history? Constitutional history – as well as comparative constitutional history – was also a part of the topic of the conference. In Western Germany the Basic law of 1949 and it’s first paragraph on human dignity confirmed the Rule of Law as its most important principle. “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” This rule made a clear cut with the former totalitarian legal system and contributed highly to give power to the German judiciary and especially the German constitutional court, which started its work in 1951. All constitutional reforms in European countries – e.g. after the authoritarian regimes in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, and the former Soviet satellite states after the 130 renaissance for legal history Comparative constitutional history 26 Marianne Lundius, “The Changing Role of National Courts”, Europarättslig Tidskrift 2015. 27 Kjell Å Modéer (ed.), Omsorg om rättvisan: Domstolarna och domarrollen i en konstitutionell rättsstat, Stockholm 2023.
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