English Law’s Encounters with Sweden’s Loccenius

Abstract

In his inaugural lecture, the great legal historian Frederic William Maitland reflected on the role of foreign ideas in English law; he stated that ‘[w]hen great work has been done some fertilizing germ has been wafted from abroad; now it may be the influence of Azo and now of the Lombard feudists, now of Savigny and now of Brunner’. Quite apart from the fact that not all foreign ideas are good and not all good ideas are foreign, this list is puzzlingly incomplete. French jurists, in particular, are conspicuous by their absence. Where, for example, is Robert-Joseph Pothier, ‘an authority… as high as can be had, next to a court of justice in this country’ or his contemporary compatriots, Balthazar-Marie Emerigon (1716–1784) and Réné-Josué Valin (1695–1765), whose views are found throughout the canon of English cases on insurance law? One might not immediately think of adding Swedish legal scholarship to Maitland’s list.