Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt
Encyclopedia
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
jurist and legislator, particularly known as a proponent of Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
n Legal Realism
Legal realism
Legal realism is a school of legal philosophy that is generally associated with the culmination of the early-twentieth century attack on the orthodox claims of late-nineteenth-century classical legal thought in the United States...
, having been strongly influenced by his compatriot, the charismatic philosopher Axel Hägerström
Axel Hägerström
Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström was a Swedish philosopher and jurist.Born in Vireda, Jönköping County Sweden, he was the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. As student at Uppsala University, he gave up theology for a career in philosophy...
. He studied Law at Lund University
Lund University
Lund University , located in the city of Lund in the province of Scania, Sweden, is one of northern Europe's most prestigious universities and one of Scandinavia's largest institutions for education and research, frequently ranked among the world's top 100 universities...
and was a professor of law at the University of Uppsala from 1914 to 1947. Like Hägerström, Karl Olivecrona
Karl Olivecrona
Karl Olivecrona was a Swedish 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. One of the internationally best-known Swedish legal theorists, Olivecrona was a professor of procedural...
and Alf Ross
Alf Ross
Alf Niels Christian Ross was a Danish legal and moral philosopher and scholar of international law. He is best known as one of the leading exponents of Scandinavian Legal Realism....
, he resists the exposition of rights as metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
entities, arguing that realistic legal analysis should dispense with them. Lundstedt's main focus in his theoretical work became a sustained attack on what he called the method of justice. He considered that there was no objective way to define the requirements of justice and that invocations of justice cloaked purely subjective preferences or unacceptable metaphysical claims. Instead, law and legislation should be guided by a method of social welfare centred on objective study of social conditions and of the practical effects and capabilities of law in improving society for all its members. Lundstedt was a member of the Swedish parliament for many years and promoted within it changes to the penal system and a range of other liberal reforms.
Works
- Den historiska rättspositivismen: med särskild hänsyn till Bergbohms lära (Uppsala, 1929)
- Superstition or Rationality in Action for Peace (London, 1925)
- Die Unwissenschaftlichkeit der Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin, 1932 – 1936)
- Legal Thinking Revised. My Views on Law (Stockholm, 1956)