Western Scandinavia: Exit Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch—the Resurrection of Customary Laws (original) (raw)

Cross Trade and Innovations: Judicial Consequences of German Historical Exegesis and Pietistic Individualism in Denmark

Deutsch-dänische Kulturbeziehungen, eds. Stefanie Stockhorst, Søren Peter Hansen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018

Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen "So mögen gemeinschaftlich Begeisterte in gleichemSinn fortdichten an diesem ewigen Gedicht." Die We iterführung einiger Aspekte der Schelling'schen Naturphilosophie beiHenrik Steffens ...........153 Christoph Schmitt-Maaß Die bösen deutschen Aufklärerund das Glück des Vo lkes. Zu einem Darstellungstopos des Struensee-Skandals in Literatur und Film vor und nach 1945 .

The creation of a Scandinavian provincial law

Historical Research 86 (2013)

It is well known that lawmaking was inseparable from kingship in England and on the continent and, therefore, there has been a predominant tendency to see medieval laws in Scandinavia in a regal context. In this light, the initiators of laws have been kings and men belonging to the upper stratum of society, and the laws themselves are seen as reflecting the societal situation when they were written down. This article focuses on 'peripheral' laws, such as the Icelandic Grágás, the main Svea Law, the Uppland Law and the Hälsinge Law. It attempts to show that such laws were not inventions of any one person or group in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and that they cannot only be mirroring the time in which they were written down. Rather there are complex layers in the versions of these laws that survive: some old customary law, some probably newly composed law, some having their roots in Roman legal tradition and some in canon law. The picture which emerges is much less clear-cut than has been supposed, showing many regional differences and peculiarities.

Legal Culture in the Danelaw: a Study of III Æthelred

Anglo-Saxon England, 2022

(Open Access at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675121000065) Abstract: Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under 'Dena lage' and those under 'Ængla lage'. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides critical evidence for legal customs being practised in the Danelaw at the close of the tenth century. An investigation into the code’s peace protections re-examines the argument for occurrences of communal liability in England before the Normans. Wantage’s restrictions on access to law and the need to ‘buy law’ suggest a departure from English conceptions of rights. Provisions on proof in legal cases, including a ‘jury’ of thegns, denote alternative measures of the truth. These analyses depict a Danelaw legal culture that reflects viking army origins, a Scandinavian preference for informal dispute-settlement (‘love’) and the concerns of a landholding Anglo-Scandinavian elite. -- Winner of three 'best article' prizes: Sutherland Prize for British Legal History from the American Society for Legal History, the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, and the Best Article by an Early-Career Researcher award from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England.

Translation and the Fracturing of the Law: The Motivation Behind the Norwegian Law of 1604

RMN Newsletter 15-16, 2020

This was in volume 15-16 (2020-2021), which actually came out in 2022. In the 16th century, numerous translations into Danish were made of the 13th-century Old Norwegian law-code, the Landslov, which was still in force in Norway. This article argues that these translations were made not only due to the linguistic difficulties facing Danes working with a law-code in Old Norwegian, but also reflect an attempt to stop the Norwegian legal system fracturing as a consequence of a multitude of Danish versions of the law.

European Legal Concepts in Scandinavian Law and Language

In this article, I present the results of an empirical study of one aspect of what I call discursive implementation of human rights law in Scandinavian legal systems: translation strategies applied by Scandinavian Supreme Courts when referring to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). My point of departure is a study of the roughly 85 accessible Danish Supreme Court decisions. I look for the strategies applied by Danish judges in their attempt to accommodate the "novel line of thinking" characteristic of the ECtHR. Next I compare and contrast the Danish strategies with the strategies applied by the Norwegian and Swedish Supreme Courts in a selection of 38 and 28 decisions, respectively. Th e study is based on the assumption that translations, mistranslations or non-translations are actions at the micro-level of law that aggregate with other micro-level actions to form and shape general processes of law. As primary legal actors, national judges determine the legal discourse that accompanies, supports, delays or promotes European legal integration. Th e results of the study are not conclusive; what is detected are diff erences in the translational attitudes and styles of the Scandinavian Supreme Courts and, as a general tendency, a transformation of the domestic law and language to hybrids of common European and national discourse.

What prospects for the 200-year-old Rhine legal regime in the European context

International rivers constitute natural grounds for the creation of a transnational single market and the Rhine is a paradigm thereof. The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (CCNR) has set up a legal framework of what still constitutes one of the most integrated transport market in Europe. As the CCNR, known to be the oldest international organisation still in existence, celebrates its 200th anniversary, it is worth analysing the legal framework it has developed to pursue its mission to regulate and promote the navigation of the Rhine. This legal framework is essentially based on three sets of rules: rules on access to the market, choice of law rules on social matters and safety rules. This system now coexists with the European Union, which is endowed with similar rule-making powers to liberalise inland water transport in Europe and has, on this basis, enacted slightly different rules on the same subject-matters. The question then arises as to how to combine both sets of rules. This article compares the Rhine and the EU legal regimes by analysing the three sets of rules successively and tries to make proposals for a better convergence of the two.