Karl Olivecrona (25 October 1897, in

Norrbärke Dalarna () is a ''Provinces of Sweden, landskap'' (historical province) in central Sweden. English exonyms for it are Dalecarlia () and the Dales. Dalarna adjoins Härjedalen, Hälsingland, Gästrikland, Västmanland and Värmland. It is also ...

– 1980) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

lawyer and legal philosopher. He studied law at Uppsala from 1915 to 1920 and was a pupil of Axel Hägerström, the spiritual father of Scandinavian

legal realism Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law. It is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world. Legal realists be ...

. One of the internationally best-known Swedish legal theorists, Olivecrona was a professor of procedural law and legal philosophy at

Lund University , motto = Ad utrumque , mottoeng = Prepared for both , established = , type = Public research university , budget = SEK 9 billion World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

showed a related stress on a need for overwhelming coercive power to guarantee order in international relations. He became convinced that Europe required an unchallengeable controlling force to ensure its peace and unity, and that Germany alone could provide this. His pamphlet ''England eller Tyskland'' (England or Germany), published in the darkest days of the war, argued that England had lost its claim to exert leadership in Europe and that the future required an acceptance of German hegemony. Indirectly, Scandinavian legal realism, with its emphasis on "law as fact", helped to create a climate conducive to the sociological study of law. One of Olivecrona's doctoral students, Per Stjernquist, who as a left-leaning liberal entirely rejected his supervisor's politics, became a pioneer of sociology of law and was largely responsible for establishing it as a university subject in Sweden in the early 1960s.

Works

*''Law as Fact'' (London: Oxford University Press, 1939) *''England eller Tyskland'' (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1940) *''Europa och Amerika'' (Lund: Sundqvist & Emond, 1941) *"Is a Sociological Explanation of Law Possible?", 14 ''Theoria'' 167-207 (1948) *''Three Essays in Roman Law'' (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1949) *''The Problem of the Monetary Unit'' (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1957) *''Law as Fact'', 2nd edn. (London: Stevens & Sons, 1971) () *"Locke's Theory of Appropriation", 24 ''Philosophical Quarterly'' 220-34 (1974) *"Appropriation in the State of Nature: Locke on the Origin of Property", 35 ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' 211-30 (1974) *"Bentham’s ‘Veil of Mystery", 31 ''Current Legal Problems'' 227-37 (1978)

Further reference

Torben Spaak, ''A Critical Appraisal of Karl Olivecrona's Legal Philosophy'' (Springer, 2014). Roger Cotterrell, "Northern Lights: From Swedish Realism to Sociology of Law", 40 ''Journal of Law and Society'' 657-69 (2013).

Works

Further reference

See also