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The aim of this dissertation is to illuminate the interplay between female agency and legal regulation in Sweden during the period 1760-1860. The material chosen for the study relates to matters concerning women that were brought before the Judiciary Inspection, the highest legal authority in Sweden. From its central position in the state hierarchy, this court was an arena in which the central power could identify and find solutions to problems important for the stability and development of society. The study identifies issues that encouraged women to bring proceedings before the court, or prompted other parties to bring women to court. The dissertation has analysed the actions taken and arguments made in these cases by women, their counterparts, and court representatives, in relation to the regulations or the absence of regulations in each particular situation. This has shown the room for manoeuvre that could be achieved, and how the women could achieve it – in terms of right to manage property, economic agency and debt responsibility, finding ways to support themselves and their families, or affirming their positions as mothers and mistresses of households. In this way, the dissertation illuminates the freedom of agency in practice that has often been seen as contradictory in a strictly patriarchal society like early modern Sweden. The dissertation also traces some important changes over time, including the increasingly diverse class background of litigants over the period in question, shifts in understandings of property, work, family, and the meaning of legal majority. The central diachronic claims are firstly that the legal system shifted over time from one primarily based upon status, circumstance, and local opinion to one based on formalized understanding of the law founded upon contract and clear legal definitions, and that this had important implications for women’s room for manoeuvre in the courts and in society. Secondly, that the negotiation process contributed to historical change by forcing solutions to contradictions and specifying terms of property ownership and legal majority.

Tegengren, Gunilla, 2015: Sverige och Nordlanden. Förvaltning och nordlig expansion, 1250-1550. (Sweden and the Northern Provinces. Central and provincial governance, administration and territorial expansion in the north, 1250-1550). Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Written in Swedish, with an English summary. Since the nineteenth century Sweden has been described in research as a kingdom on the European periphery whose development during the Middle Ages was determined by specifically national characteristics and placed it with in its European context. More recent international scholarship emphasises the common characteristics of the history of the European states. An entire system of cultural events, through the dominance of the papacy, was copied and permeated throughout kingdoms and principalities. This thesis utilizes a systemic perspective and applies the over-arching hypothesis that social developments in Sweden during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries followed the same patterns that underpinned social change and territorial expansion in other peripheries of Europe. The thesis aims to explain the state formation process through the Swedish position as a realm within the papacy. This thesis examines the hypothesis that the Swedish state formation process can be understood from the territorial management and the administrative systems used. General results are linked to Max Weber’s definition of the territorial state in which the state has a legal system with well-planned and rationally established rules for administration and taxation both in the core area, and as a method of territorial expansion. Such systems have been distinguished in the medieval sources, analyzed and explained in this study. This thesis shows that the systems for mark planning and assessment were not only used in the core area of the realm, but also as the means when the Swedish Crown annexed the northern parts of Sweden and Finland in the fourteenth century. The study is conducted on two chronological levels. The first part examines the period between 1250 and 1297 when a new legal system was prepared and finally enshrined by the king. The source material primarily consists of the Law of Uppland and diplomas. The second part examines the period between 1297 and 1550 in which the source material consists of the Laws of Uppland and Hälsingland, diplomas, land registers, and taxation documents. Based on data from the land registry, the medieval taxation in the northern provinces has been reconstructed and followed over 250 years. This thesis brings to the fore valuable knowledge of the state formation in Sweden and gives the provinces of Nordlanden a chronological history that has been unknown until now. Den svenska statsbildningen är ett omdiskuterat historiskt problem. Man har länge hävdat att förutsättningar för en svensk statsförvaltning saknades under medeltiden och blev möjlig först på Gustav Vasas tid. I den här avhandlingen undersöks statsbildningen från ett förvaltningsperspektiv och visar helt nya resultat. Folkungatiden 1250 – 1389 var en period av stark förnyelse då en centraliserad statsförvaltning byggdes upp och staten införde ett system för individuell beskattning av böndernas jord. Under denna period expanderade Sverige också mot norr och de hälsingska och bottniska landskapen anslöts till det svenska riket. Från ett förvaltningshistoriskt perspektiv var det Upplandslagen och dess administrativa ordningar som kom att ligga till grund för all senare förvaltningsutveckling i vårt land. Upplandslagen var höjdpunkten i den omvälvande politiska utvecklingsprocess som påbörjades av Birger jarl och gjorde Sverige till en territoriell monarki bland andra i medeltidens europeiska samhälle.

Pure legal learning: cognitive functions in a normative system Norms are the obvious foundation for most of legal sociology and jurisprudence. Norms can be defined as counterfactual expectations, expectations that do not change even when counter-evidence of reality is presented. Thus learning is counter to our intuition of law. However, law does change, and some of the changes can be described as learning. Law changes by political decisions when the legislator acts, it can change incrementally when the judge makes a decision, it changes when new practices become binding, and it changes when doctrine is developed in legal science. If we differentiate between learning within a worldview and a learning that changes world-views, most cases of legal change can be interpreted as decision-making within a world-view, not the development of one. In this article, the author develops a conceptual frame of reference, in terms of pure legal learning, for a specific type of legal change. Pure legal learning denotes a learning process, which is not merely a change within a world-view, but a change in the legal world-views themselves. This is therefore the process where degrees of freedom for legal change are defined. Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv