Scandinavian legal realism
Scandinavian legal realism rejected metaphysical accounts of law and sought an empirically intelligible description of legal institutions and behavior. In Sweden, Axel Hägerström and later realist jurists influenced legal education, legislation, and a source-based method strongly oriented toward statutes and legislative preparatory works.
The tradition is relevant to Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases, but it should not become a catch-all explanation for bad fact-finding. The direct procedural mechanisms are Free evaluation of evidence in Sweden, limited methodological rules for credibility and reliability, political lay participation, and institutional deference to earlier decisions.
Calling the system “vibes-based legal realism” joins two different claims. Realism was a jurisprudential program that presented itself as scientific. The “vibes” problem arises when a court treats demeanor, coherence, the supposedly self-experienced quality of a story, or unsourced general experience as if those impressions were validated tests. Felaktigt dömda documents exactly that evidentiary problem without needing to prove that legal realism caused it.
The stronger critical thesis is therefore limited: Swedish legal culture gave judges broad fact-evaluation discretion inside a system historically skeptical of abstract natural-rights reasoning and comfortable with law as a social instrument. That history may help explain institutional style, but a causal account requires comparative evidence linking legal education and judicial method to criminal-proof decisions.