Ditlev Tamm

The History of the Court of Justice of the European Union Since its Origin

This article deals with the history of the Court of Justice of the European Union since its foundation in 1952 as a court of the European Coal and Steel Community. In an introductory chapter the Court is described on a comparative basis with other supreme courts. The European spirit of the Court is described as are the first years of its existence. In the first part the foundation and the juridical architecture of the Court are explained. In the second part the history of the Court is followed from the landmark cases of 1963 and 1964 through the most important cases of the 1970s and 1980s up to a number of cases in recent decades marked by important changes in the Treaties on which the jurisdiction of the Court is founded.

Creating a Danish legal language: legal terminology in the medieval Law of Scania

In the decades after 1200 the kingdom of Denmark developed a corpus of provincial laws written in Danish for the three major legal provinces. With the legislation for the eastern province of Scania as a starting point, this article shows how the writing down of the law led not only to the creation of a legal language but to a written vernacular language in general. It was not until the fifteenth century that written Danish was found outside of texts; charters and narrative until that point had been written in Latin.

Lay Judges and Professionals in Danish Courts

In Denmark the law courts were only professionalized at the end of the eighteenth century. A long tradition of lay judges was then broken, and a new discussion as to the introduction of juries in Denmark was only started in the nineteenth century. In 1919 Danish court procedure rules were reformed and lay judges were introduced. This article comments on the current Danish discussion as to the relation between lay judges and professional judges.