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Jacob Sundberg

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Jacob W.F. Sundberg (1927–2023) was a Swedish jurist, professor of jurisprudence (allmän rättslära) at Stockholm University from 1970 to 1993, and Sweden’s most prominent academic champion of the European Convention on Human Rights. A conservative critic of the Hägerströmian tradition, he celebrated Sweden’s expropriation losses in Strasbourg in the early 1980s as victories over a legal philosophy he described as having been in “secret marriage” with Social Democracy since the 1920s and acutely dangerous to the Swedish Rechtsstaat.1 He is the vault’s clearest case of the rights revolution arriving in Sweden through a deliberate campaign against Scandinavian legal realism.

Career

Sundberg was born in Stockholm on 29 May 1927, son of Halvar Sundberg, professor of public and international law and founder of the IOIR whose directorship the son later took over. He took his law degree at Uppsala in 1948, a Master of Comparative Jurisprudence at New York University in 1957, and his doctorate at Stockholm in 1962 with Air Charter, a study in air law. After a preceptorship in private law he was appointed professor of jurisprudence in 1970, holding the chair until his retirement in 1993, with guest professorships in New York, Sydney, Boston, and Akron. He died on 27 July 2023.23

His professorship began with a confrontation. The 1970 inaugural lecture argued that the Swedish system was beginning to resemble the Soviet one; Svenska Dagbladet gave it a half page, and the response from the political establishment set the terms of his career: justice minister Lennart Geijer declared that those who thought the courts existed to protect citizens’ rights against the state were conducting “antidemocratic criticism” of Sweden’s parliamentary system.4

Strasbourg against the Hägerströmian tradition

When Sweden lost the expropriation case Sporrong & Lönnroth v. Sweden at the ECtHR in 1982 — over the Lex Norrmalm regime that had kept Stockholm properties under expropriation threat for decades — Sundberg openly celebrated the defeat. Strang documents his framing: the loss was a victory over the Hägerströmian tradition, which had been in “secret marriage” with Social Democracy since the 1920s and had become acutely dangerous to the Swedish Rechtsstaat when Palme and his cohorts decided to “introduce socialism” in the 1970s.1 Strang places this at the turning point of the school’s historiography: the first attacks on the realist hegemony came not from the left but from conservatives and neo-liberals who saw in the ECHR an instrument against the omnipotent state.

Sundberg turned the episode into infrastructure. He founded the Nordic moot-court competition on the Convention — the Sporrong-Lönnroth Prize, first held in 1984 and since renamed the Nordic Human Rights Moot — and led it for twenty years. As Swedish rapporteur for the Council of Europe from 1983 he published the critical series Human Rights in Sweden (1984–1988), documenting the domestic resistance to the Convention. When Sweden finally incorporated the ECHR as domestic law in 1995, contemporaries credited the change to his groundwork.2

The ius docendi affair

The domestic establishment struck back in 1989, when the law-program board at Stockholm University moved to strip him of his teaching right (ius docendi), on the stated ground that his human-rights teaching was not “scientific” — a charge that read, against the vault’s background, as the Uppsala school’s scientism turned against its critic. The attempt collapsed under international academic attention and indignation.2 In 2002 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, proposed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.5 His memoir, Minnen från en stormig professur (2008), and the polemical Från Ekelöf till Europa carry his own account of the campaign.3

Sundberg in the vault

Scandinavian legal realism quotes his “secret marriage” characterization as the conservative pole of the school’s post-war reckoning, and Did legal realism weaken Swedish rights protection holds the causal question his career presupposed answered. His target named names: the tradition he fought ran from Axel Hägerström through Vilhelm Lundstedt and Karl Olivecrona to Per Olof Ekelöf’s procedural teleology. The vault’s balanced caution applies to him too: his was an actor’s account from within the conflict, and Strang warns that influence claims in either direction are seldom substantiated with historical evidence.1

  1. Scandinavian Legal Realism and Human Rights (Johan Strang, Nordic Journal of Human Rights 36(3) 2018); saved manuscript. ↩↩↩

  2. “Nordic forum for a living European Convention: Jacob W.F. Sundberg in memoriam,” ekmrforum.org. ↩↩↩

  3. “Jacob Wilhelm Fredrik Sundberg,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences member directory, amacad.org. ↩↩

  4. Jacob W.F. Sundberg, “Om Sverige och andra stater som svarande i Europadomstolen” (lecture, 10 November 2005), nkmr.org. An interested first-party account; the Geijer exchange is reported as Sundberg recalls it. ↩

  5. “Jacob W.F. Sundberg till minne,” Svensk Juristtidning 2023, p. 949, svjt.se/svjt/2023/949. ↩

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