Project Manager
Elisabeth AronssonProject manager
Örebro UniversityAmount granted
220 000 SEKYear
2020
Increased international influence has meant that the Swedish legal system has to some extent needed (and still needs) to adapt to a view of the legal sources in which legal principles are given a more prominent and significant role than the Swedish legal tradition has historically given them. The research project deals with the use of general legal principles in Swedish law.
Legal principles are often unwritten or vague in both their content and boundaries. They are also multifunctional. Legal principles can be the basis or origin of other legal rules, be used to fill in gaps in a set of rules, or constitute what other rules are to be interpreted from or in the light of. Legal principles can both refer to a given legal rule/norm (e.g. the principle of legality) and systematize several legal rules/norms (e.g. principles of the rule of law). In legal argumentation, it is also not uncommon to refer only to "principles of the rule of law", "principles of tort law" or "general principles of law" without defining them further.
The project aims to study and systematize the characteristics and functions of general principles of law in the application of law and in legal argumentation. In order to fulfill the purpose, the project investigates what characterizes legal principles in the legal science context, how the characteristics change depending on the context and which function(s) the legal principle performs in a given legal science context.