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Per Olof Ekelöf

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Per Olof Ekelöf (1906–1990) was a Swedish procedural-law scholar, professor of procedural law at Uppsala from 1943 to 1972, and the dominant theorist of Swedish civil procedure in the post-war era. Within the vault he is the named channel through which Axel Hägerström’s philosophy entered procedural doctrine: Two Visions of Time reports, citing proceduralist Thomas Andersson, that Ekelöf rejected individual-rights protection as the function of civil procedure in favor of realizing the purposes of substantive legislation — handlingsdirigering, steering behavior so that rules are internalized — leaving courts as instruments of the legislature.1

Career

Ekelöf was born in Stockholm on 3 May 1906, studied at Uppsala under Hägerström and Adolf Phalén, took his doctorate there in 1937 with Om interventionsgrunden, and was appointed professor of procedural law in 1943, succeeding Thore Engströmer, a post he held until 1972. His writings span the Rättegång textbook series (five volumes, 1957–1990), the theoretical Processuella grundbegrepp och allmänna processprinciper (1956), and the methodological essay “Är den juridiska doktrinen en teknik eller en vetenskap?” (1951), which grounded the analysis of the concept of right in Uppsala-school value nihilism and modern semantics. He was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1969 and held honorary doctorates from Cologne, Oslo, and Copenhagen. He died on 17 September 1990.23

Procedure as behavior steering

Ekelöf’s signature contribution is the teleological method: legal doctrine is a technique in which societal purposes carry decisive weight in the application of law. Already in Straffet, skadeståndet och vitet (1942) he treated the distinct sanctions as steering instruments for citizens’ conduct in a wider societal perspective, and the same view governs his conception of the trial. The proceedings are one link in a unified sanction mechanism in which behavior is steered primarily through moral formation rather than deterrence — citizens are presumed to comply from a sense of duty, not from fear. On this account, protecting individual rights is not the point of civil procedure; the judgment realizes the purposes the legislature has set.2

This is precisely the doctrine Two Visions of Time places inside the rättsstat paradigm: courts loyal to and dependent on the political branch, preparatory works consulted by default, judgments openly pursuing the legislature’s purposes.

The same year he published a short piece that fixes his position on Rättssäkerhet, and it is the vault’s dated anchor for what the realist era did to that concept. Ekelöf held the value of rättssäkerhet “oberoende av den gällande rättens innehåll,” meaning nothing other than that life in society is shaped by the rules of the law in force.5 This is the formal account in its purest form, and it is available in any argument except the one that would say a law’s content is wrong.

The formal definition did not sideline the concept, though. Klami’s defense of the method argues that critics routinely miss how important a teleological argument rättssäkerhet was for Ekelöf, with the predictability grounded in the statutory text doing its work precisely through rättssäkerhet reasoning.6 The term was operative inside the method and confined to one register. That is the form Realist foundations of Swedish rättssäkerhet deficits gives its disarmament claim.

Klami also attributes the method’s foundations to the school outright: Ekelöf “i grund och botten representerar den skandinaviska realismen.”6

His other major research line ran in the opposite, formal direction: from 1948 he applied logical-mathematical reasoning and probability calculus to the evaluation of evidence, starting an international discussion that continued for decades.2

The realist abroad

Strang’s human-rights article preserves a characteristic episode. Reporting to Svensk Juristtidning from a congress in post-war Berlin, Ekelöf was baffled by the German renaissance of natural law, but observed that what the Germans meant by “the principles of natural law” was the UDHR. In this way, he argued, “natural law had become anchored in some kind of realities” — absorbing the new rights idiom into the realist framework rather than converting to it.7 The move is the procedural counterpart of Alf Ross’s rehabilitation of rights-talk as presentational technique.

Ekelöf in the vault

Scandinavian legal realism names him as the school’s channel into Swedish procedural practice, and Two Visions of Time is the source for the handlingsdirigering doctrine. His case shows the school’s influence running through technical legal scholarship rather than political pamphleteering — the opposite path from Karl Olivecrona’s. Whether this doctrinal formation weakened rights protection in practice is the open question carried by Did legal realism weaken Swedish rights protection.

  1. Two Visions of Time (Agnes Hellner and Karolina Stenlund, Scandinavian Studies in Law 69, 2023), citing Thomas Andersson; saved copy. ↩

  2. “Per Olof Ekelöf in memoriam,” Svensk Juristtidning 1990, p. 668, svjt.se/svjt/1990/668. ↩↩↩

  3. “Per-Olof Ekelöf,” Nationalencyklopedin, ne.se; see also lex.dk/Per_Olof_Ekelöf. ↩

  4. “Professorsutnämningar i Uppsala och Lund,” Svensk Juristtidning 1943, p. 544, svjt.se/svjt/1943/544; on the committee’s composition, Riksarkivet’s authority record for Processlagberedningen, 1932–1944. ↩

  5. Rättssamhälle och rättssäkerhet (Per Olof Ekelöf, Svensk Juristtidning 1942, s. 15); saved copy. Om rättssäkerhet note 9 treats the passage as the reference case for the formal Swedish account of the concept. ↩

  6. Något om Ekelöfs teleologiska metod (Hannu Tapani Klami, Svensk Juristtidning 1990 s. 226); saved copy. The rättssäkerhet observation is at s. 227 point 4(2), the realism attribution at s. 228. ↩↩

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

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