Karl Olivecrona: A Biographical Sketch

Abstract

Karl Olivecrona was born 1897 in Uppsala. Having received his law degree in 1920 and having clerked at the District Court in Uppsala 1921–1923, he began working on his doctoral dissertation at Uppsala University 1924 and received his doctorate 1928. He went on to specialize in procedural law and was appointed professor of procedural law at Lund University 1933. He retired 1964 at the age of 67, but kept on writing on jurisprudential questions through-out the 1970’s. He had married Birgit Lange in 1929 and had two children with her, namely Christina and Thomas. Having had his first major jurisprudential work, Law as Fact (1st ed.) published in 1939, he came to devote most of his energies to work in the field of jurisprudence, and the second edition of Law as Fact was published in 1971. He also wrote two books of a more political nature in 1940 and in 1942, arguing in the first book, England or Germany? 1940 that Swedes and other Europeans ought not to fear, but to welcome, a German victory in World War II, since (he reasoned) this was necessary to bring about a peaceful, stable, and prosperous new order in Europe, which could replace the divided and inefficient old order, dominated by England. I argue briefly, however, that the alleged connection between Olivecrona’s legal philosophy and Olivecrona’s thoughts on German leadership in Europe is not a logical connection, but at most a psychological one. Olivecrona died 1980 in Lund and lies buried in Uppsala in the same cemetery as Axel Hägerström and Vilhelm Lundstedt.