One day the law professor Stig Strömholm took the train to Uppsala and after reading two or three pages angrily threw away his daily newspaper, the Svenska Dagbladet.
"Sometimes I just can't stand it," he is reported to have said, "reading my own articles."
Strömholm was born in the north of Sweden and described himself as a “legal chameleon” in an interview. His career combined a great many foreign universities and subjects with a single Swedish university location. In Uppsala he went through all stages from law student to rector of the university, beyond the national borders he was shaped by international law studies in Cambridge, his doctorate in Munich in 1964 as a Humboldtian with a partly at the Max Planck Institute for foreign and international patents and trademarks - and copyright work. The Swedish doctoral thesis of 1966 was 900 pages long and written in French.
Later, when he had long since become a European scholar of standing (President of the Academia Europaea from 1997 to 2002), he thought about what it means that English has supplanted all other scientific languages.
Intellectual property law remained one of his core competencies throughout his life, but he published far and sensationally diligently beyond.
Scandinavian legal realism
Because university reforms and social upheavals fell into his life span. Instead of the “Legal Encyclopedia” lecture, “Jurisprudence” was taught from 1958, Strömholm was appointed professor for it in Uppsala in 1969, and in private law, not only in Sweden, the state intervened in favor of more social justice. In comparison, so Strömholm wrote in 1976, even the introduction of the new Swedish constitution of 1974 was less momentous. He and his generation, shaped by Scandinavian legal realism, experienced a demystification and politicization of private law, which should remain. Swedish colleagues still recommend his textbook “Rätt, rättskällor och rättstillämpning” (Law, Sources of Law and Application of Law, 6th edition 2020) as the only useful work on methodology for students.
His “Brief History of Occidental Legal Philosophy” (1991) and his “General Legal Doctrine” (1976) were made available to German students; the latter at the instigation of the Romanist Franz Wieacker - an accolade in itself. Wieacker gave the laudation when Strömholm was elected to the order Pour le mérite for science and the arts in 1988. His novels, which always chose historical themes and of which “Das Tal” (German 1980) is probably the best: In the fifth century, a young man wants to save his uncle's commentary on Virgil from the Huns - the update of the The topos of the opposition between culture and barbarism is a characteristic expression of Strömholm's mission. The Roman uncle explains: “There are three things for the sake of which it is worth fighting for the empire:Peace, sensible laws and the opportunity to lead a comfortable life devoted to good literature. ”The translator into Danish was Queen Margrethe II.
Between 1960 and 1995, Svenska Dagbladet published an astonishing 147 essays by their permanent collaborator in the feature section under “Under Strecket” alone. They devoted themselves exclusively to the writers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on France. He could write whatever he wanted: the editors printed almost everything the educated author delivered as a literary critic, and they barely changed a word (according to his own statements). As a lawyer, Strömholm cultivates such a characteristic style that Swedish law students were advised in the lecture not to follow it; only a bad imitation could come out.
Stig Strömholm is now considered a culturally conservative representative of the Swedish elite and is allegedly proud that his wife is the only person who has not seen him dressed in a three-piece suit (preferably a tweed). Today he is celebrating his ninetieth birthday.