Karl Olivecrona (25 October 1897, in

Norrbärke Dalarna () is a ''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 bordered by Norway in ...

– 1980) was a Swedish lawyer and legal philosopher. He studied law at Uppsala from 1915 to 1920 and was a pupil of

Axel Hägerström Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström (6 September 1868, Vireda – 7 July 1939, Uppsala) was a Swedish philosopher. Born in Vireda, Jönköping County, Sweden, he was the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. As student at Uppsala University, he gave ...

, 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 ...

. 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 World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

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 Per Stjernquist (1912–2005) was a Swedish law professor who was almost single-handedly responsible for establishing the teaching of the new field of sociology of law in Sweden from the 1960s. Stjernquist began his career as a local judge and c ...

, 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