Olivecrona, Karl (1897–1980)

A dominating juristic figure in his native Sweden and widely recognized abroad, Karl Olivecrona was a leader of the movement known as Scandinavian legal realism or the Uppsala School of legal philosophy. He studied law at Uppsala University, where the antimetaphysical teachings of the philosopher Axel Hägerström (1868–1939) strongly influenced him. As a professor of procedural law at Lund University from 1933 to 1964, Olivecrona adopted Hägerström's view that rights and duties are fictitious entities having no correspondence with reality. Olivecrona found the primary significance of legal ideas in their psychological power. This power is possible due to the popular preexisting dispositions of citizens socialized to live under a stable legal order and the consistent availability of the state's monopoly of force to support legal precepts.

Rejecting legal philosophy's orthodox concerns with law's normativity and its efforts to trace legal authority to an expression of legislative will, Olivecrona developed an uncompromisingly behavioral view focusing on official coercion and law's capacity to influence and interact with the outlook and attitudes of citizens. His inquiries into law's social psychological reality remained speculative, but he answered the question in the title of one of his papers, “Is a Sociological Explanation of Law Possible?,” with a clear affirmative. This explanation would distinguish between legal ideology (a metaphysical belief in law as an independently existing normative realm of ideas and values) and objective reality (observable behavior of citizens and officials in legal contexts). Thus, his analyses of what he saw as the emptiness of traditional juristic inquiries pointed to the need for sociolegal research.

Olivecrona's most important ideas are found in his book Law as Fact (1939). He completely rewrote it three decades later, but continued to affirm his earlier approach. His view that law depends on unchallengeable state force led him to proclaim the futility of existing international law theory based only on custom or agreement between states. Although recognizing that moral convictions support law, he saw them as often produced by the long-term conditioning effects of law enforcement or by life conditions shaped fundamentally by state law. Thus, he minimized the independent significance of morality in relation to law.

Olivecrona insisted that legal ideas are major influences in everyday life and that law channels and harnesses, rather than controls, power. These views have been important for sociolegal theory. However, his idea that overwhelming force is indispensable to peace led him, in the darkest days of World War II, to disastrous political positions. He actively propagandized in favor of Nazi Germany's hegemony, believing that Europe could unite only under the leadership of one dominant power. His response to desperate times dramatically showed the extreme danger of failing to see morality as a vital independent basis for law that could serve as a resource to judge law's legitimacy and thus give ethical meaning to its practice.