Abstract
Why have judges and lawyers played such an insignificant role in the expansion of political liberalism in Sweden? In recent decades, a multidisciplinary research programme has developed the concept of the legal complex, to capture how lawyers and judges, and the broader legal profession, sometimes emerge as a key collective actor in struggles for constrained government, basic civil liberties, and an independent civil society. However, within this research programme, Sweden, along with the other Nordic states, seems to pose an anomaly. Until only very recently, judges and lawyers, acting in the capacity of their profession, have played no determinative part in struggles for a liberal political society in Sweden. Addressing this theoretical puzzle, this paper explores the role of the legal complex in the expansion of political liberalism in Sweden over the past two centuries during four historical periods: (1) the emergence of the liberal Rechtsstaat in the nineteenth century; (2) the breakthrough of democracy and the social democratic welfare state; (3) the drastic constitutional reforms in the 1970s; and (4) the slow return to political liberalism since the 1980s. I conclude by arguing that the Swedish case suggests that political liberalism is a pre-condition for lawyers’ and judges’ political activism, rather than the other way around.
Published Version
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