ABSTRACT
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Scandinavian legal scholars began to follow the latest trends in European criminology and criminal law. Although the nineteenth-century Scandinavian criminal codes were still firmly based on earlier “classical” thinking, positivist ideas soon appeared everywhere in the Nordic countries, and these ideas found their way into legislation as well. Conditional sentencing, incarceration of dangerous recidivists, and special treatment of young offenders came to complement the system of punishments. However, positivism had its limits. It was mainly restricted to the system of punishments and, even there, positivist solutions only complemented the classical criminal law based on the idea of free will and the proportionality of punishment. Positivism hardly touched the very core of the criminal law, its so-called general part (“allgemeine Lehren”). The fact that the Nordic professors were more cautious in implementing the positivist ideas than some of their colleagues in Germany and other countries may have to do with the position of the Nordic criminal law experts. In the small Scandinavian countries, practically every academic expert was drawn into law-drafting, in which it would have been difficult to adopt extreme positions.
