| dc.description.abstract | On the 31st of July 1591 sorenskriveren (the District Judge) was introduced to the court systems in Norway. He was only supposed to write the legally recognized documents for the Court of First Instance. The selected farmers were solely the ones who were to bring in a verdict, and the District Judges should not by any means take part in the judicial measurements. Conversely, in the aftermath, historians tend to say that the District Judge would rapidly in practice possess judicial power, even though he were not given official judicial power before the act of royal prerogative on the 23rd of October 1634. However, until this day, no one knows exactly when in practice the District Judge would participate in the verdict.
The main focus of this master’s thesis is to thoroughly analyze all the preserved source materials in Agderbrevene and get an overview of all the trials where he participated as a lay judge. By using the brief amounts of existing literature on this topic, this analysis will aim into placing the District Judge as an essential key into understanding the theory of maktstaten. Furthermore, this will come into sight through the formation and standardization of the modern society, where representants of the Danish-Norwegian administration by numerous occasions brought ordinary farmers to court, saying that the District Judges alongside with the laymen were to adjudge.
Additionally, this study will show that the District Judge in 1599 was to officiate as a judge in the second legal authority where he would exert both the secretarial functions alongside the juridical functions that the judges possessed. Despite the fact that there were occurrences of District Judges only performing the secretarial functions throughout the entire period, there were to be an increasing amount of District Judges in the following years prior to 1616 that participated in the judicial measurements. | |
