Constitutional reasoning in the Nordic Supreme Courts from a comparative perspective

The courts reach their most political role when interpreting the national constitution, especially in precedential legal systems. The courts’ constitutional reasoning style will likely serve as a base structure for constitutional law and constitutional culture. Thus, the supreme courts’ reasoning style, including argumentative patterns and interpretative tools, is of great importance to a country’s legal foundation – its constitution. In an empirical analysis of forty constitutional landmark cases from all seven Nordic supreme courts (both ordinary and administrative in Finland and Sweden), the types of argument and the key constitutional concepts used by the courts are closely examined. Supreme and constitutional courts around the world have previously been studied with the same methodological framework, opening up for comparative analysis of both the Nordic courts as a group and as individual countries. The comparative analysis shows that the Nordic countries might not be so homogeneous after all, and do not stick particularly out in an international comparison. The similarities between the Nordic countries are also less significant than one might imagine, and the traditional East/West divide applied on the Nordic countries constitutional systems is not suitable to describe the Nordic supreme courts’ constitutional reasoning in landmark cases.