Nordic and Germanic Legal Methods

To gain a proper understanding of a foreign legal system, a legal scholar cannot rely on written sources alone. He must also familiarise himself with how these are interpreted and applied to hard cases. This is crucial to comparative studies and the harmonisation of law in Europe. However, materials explaining legal methods are often difficult to access for foreign lawyers, as they tend to be written in the national language and build on a series of unspoken preconceptions inherent to the specific legal order. It is therefore the purpose of this book to provide the comparative legal scholar with the tools to overcome some of these initial obstacles and gain a better understanding of how colleagues from different legal systems think about law. The present volume gives an introduction to the legal methods of the countries in the Nordic and Germanic legal families, primarily addressed to foreign readers, thus explaining also those unspoken preconceptions. It further seeks historical and cultural explanations for present-day legal methods, and explores the impact of internationalisation as well as the possibility of a common European legal method.