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Spanning two centuries and five Nordic countries, this book questions the view that political lawyers are required for the development of a liberal political regime. It combines cross-disciplinary theory and careful empirical case studies by country experts whose regional insights are brought to bear on wider global contexts.
List of contents
- 1: Malcolm Feeley, Malcolm Langford: Introduction
- 2: Malcolm Feeley, Malcolm Langford: Nordic Exceptionalism and the legal complex
- 3: Johan Karlsson Schaffer: Sweden: The legal complex in struggles for political liberalism
- 4: Mikael Rask Madsen: Denmark: Between the law-state and the welfare state
- 5: Malcolm Langford: Norwegian lawyers and political mobilization: 1623-2015
- 6: Hans Petter Graver: The legal complex: Denmark and Norway under German occupation 1940-1945
- 7: Esa Konttinen: Finland: Lawyers in and out of the shadows of political liberalism
- 8: Ragnhildur Helgadóttir: Iceland: Lawyers, politics and liberalism
- 9: Malcolm Langford: Revisiting the theory of the legal complex
About the author
Malcolm Feeley,
Claire Sanders Clements Dean's Professor of Law, UC Berkeley, Malcolm Langford,
Professor of Public Law, University of Oslo
Summary
Spanning two centuries and five Nordic countries, this book questions the view that political lawyers are required for the development of a liberal political regime. It combines cross-disciplinary theory and careful empirical case studies by country experts whose regional insights are brought to bear on wider global contexts.
Additional text
The Limits of the Legal Complex raises the scholarship on legal complexes to a new level of scholarly refinement. This superb combination of empirical studies on Nordic countries, and its broad, constructively critical, theoretical extensions, notably advance comparative and historical theory on the conditions under which legal complexes have, and have not, mobilized for basic legal freedoms, an open civil society and moderate state—key elements of political liberalism—since the 17th century in Europe and across the world thereafter.
