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232
III. CONSTITUTION AND ADMINISTRATION OF SWEDEN.
are being tried. With respect to the publicity of procedure and of the records
of the proceedings, the same regulations hold good as for the corresponding
general courts of justice.
As a general rule it may be stated that there are no special courts
constituted for dealing with disputes in administrative affairs. Such are dealt
with by the body or authority immediately concerned, against whose decision
appeal may be made in the final resort to the Government. In cases respecting
the administration of the poor law, the Audit Court is that of final resort.
Executive authority is not exercised by the courts of justice, but by
special bodies, chiefly administrative in character. Claims for the recovery of a
debt, of which the creditor has evidence in writing, are to be preferred either
in the inferior courts of justice or before superior executive bodies. The decisions
arrived at in the latter case may be appealed against in the Court of appeal, while
a debtor who has been sentenced to pay a claim which he repudiates, may bring
the matter before the notice of an inferior court of justice.
Sweden has accepted the articles of the Hague Convention respecting
international legal assistance, as it is termed. A special convention had, long
before, been entered into with Denmark, whereby the execution of sentences was
assured for the two countries commutatively.
Of the three Courts of appeal, the Svea Hofrätt embraces within its
jurisdiction Svealand, Norrland, and the island of Gotland; the Hofrätt for Skåne and
Blekinge, those two provinces; and the Göta Hofrätt, the remaining provinces in
Götaland. The areas and populations of the country under the jurisdiction of
each of the three were in 1900:
Läns. Sq.-kilom. Population.
Svea Hofrätt................................. 14 349,209 2,492,989
Göta > ................................. 8 75,255 1,868,680
Skåne » ................................. 3 14,289 774,772
To obtain the total area of Sweden, 9,109 sq.-km. must be added on for
the four large lakes in Central Sweden.
Some of the more important items in the Swedish Judicial
Statistics for past decades may be here given, by way of conclusion to this
survey. (The criminal statistics have already appeared in this work).
The annual number of cases of dispute brought before the courts of the
first instance is as follows (for the sake of comparison the figures of
the population are appended):
p Mean popu- No. of Cases Per 1,000
renofls- lation. Annually. inhab.
1831/40....................................... 3,013,722 80,440 26 69
1841/50....................................... 3,306,269 70,835 21’42
1851/60...................................... 3,642,321 54,593 14 99
1861/70....................................... 4.079,233 43,710 10-72
1871,80....................................... 4,386,953 31,780 7 24
1881/90....................................... 4,673,225 39,700 8 50
1891/95....................................... 4,831,814 40,361 8 35
1896/00....................................... 5,032,074 40,842 8-12
The astonishing diminution in these figures is, doubtless, to be ascribed to
a constantly extending educational improvement among the masses; for that,
contrary to the expectation of many, appears unmistakably to have lessened the
attractiveness of going to law. It is, however, possible that the courts of justice
are less resorted to, on account of the slowness of all procedure in them. Of
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