Karl Olivecrona

Karl Olivecrona lived from October 25, 1897 to 1980 and was a Swedish lawyer and legal philosopher who studied law at Uppsala from 1915 to 1920 as a pupil of Axel Hägerström, the spiritual father of Scandinavian legal realism. One of the internationally best-known Swedish legal theorists, he was a professor of procedural law and legal philosophy at Lund University, and his writings emphasized the psychological significance of legal ideas. His most influential work on legal theory, the 1939 first edition of Law as Fact, stressed the importance of a monopoly of force as the basis of law; a substantially revised second edition followed in 1971, changed considerably following Germany's defeat in World War II. Olivecrona's own wartime political views leaned toward endorsing German hegemony in Europe, expressed in his 1940 pamphlet England or Germany, while one of his doctoral students, Per Stjernquist, rejected his supervisor's politics and became a pioneer of the sociology of law in Sweden. Scandinavian legal realism, with its emphasis on law as fact, helped create a climate conducive to the sociological study of law generally.