From Courts of Appeal to Courts of Precedent—Access to the Highest Courts in the Nordic Countries

In none of the Nordic countries does one find unlimited access of appeal in civil cases to the highest courts. The Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian Supreme Courts operate with a qualitative criterion, where the precedent effect for other cases is decisive for granting access to the highest court. The Icelandic Supreme Court is the highest court in a two-level court hierarchy and operates with a quantitative criterion where the value of the disputed object is decisive. The present-day access regimes in the Nordic countries were all put in place after 1971. Intercommunication between the courts has been important when reforming civil procedure to limit access as a measure by which to deal with the problem of backlogs. Still, there are some variations in the context of the access filters, and hence in how they actually work. By comparing the access filters applied on appeals to the highest courts in the Nordic countries we are able to observe how similar problems are solved by using similar access criteria, how shared legal culture on one level enables the intercommunication that leads to similar access filters, how these access filters operate within different contexts, and how these contexts on another level create situations that are somewhat different for each of the Nordic supreme courts.