University of Oslo Faculty of Law
Alongside the law faculties in Copenhagen, Lund and Uppsala, it is one of Scandinavia's leading institutions of legal education and research.
[1] The faculty is the highest-ranked institution of legal education in Norway and is responsible for the professional law degree, one of the most competitive programmes at any Norwegian university.
The faculty offers education and conducts research in both law and in related areas such as criminology and sociology of law, and historically also in economics (its former Dean, Ragnar Frisch, was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
The faculty occupies the old university campus in the centre of Oslo, near the National Theatre, the Royal Palace, and the Parliament, constructed 1841–1851 by Christian Heinrich Grosch with the assistance of world-famous Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Schinkel's neoclassical style, with strong similarities to Schinkel's famous museums on the Museum Island in Berlin.
It is complemented by the new building Domus Juridica in the opposite direction, located between the Old National Gallery and the Museum of Cultural History, facing the old campus.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in the atrium of the central building of the old campus, Domus Media, 1947–1989 and in 2020.
With the rise of absolute monarchy and a more professional civil service, legal education became of central importance by the early 18th century.
Norway and Denmark hence shared a common legal tradition and in fact many of the same laws.
The field of economics as an academic discipline in Norway evolved at the Faculty of Law.
In 1840, a chair in "Jurisprudence, Economics, and Statistics" was created by the King; it was first held by Anton Martin Schweigaard.
[6] Although students do not receive a formal degree before they have completed the five-year programme, the first four years correspond to an American J.D.
Alternatively, they may choose to write a longer thesis, corresponding to a full year.
In recent years, a number of specialized master's degree programmes in law, so-called LL.M.
), created in 1824, traditionally to doctoral candidates who are not legal professionals (for example to those with degrees in humanities or social sciences) or to scholars with a background in law who write a dissertation in a different field than law, and today to doctoral candidates who are not enrolled in the structured doctoral programme, but hand in their dissertation following independent research only (as was the case also for the dr.jur.
In medicine there is a strong tradition in Norway of considering all doctors as part of an educational elite and placing little emphasis on university-level grades due to the very high admission requirements, and this culture of emphasizing that all law graduates from the University of Oslo are part of an educational elite has also become more prevalent in the legal field as admission requirements to the law programme became extremely high.
Eminent academics in this field include Nils Christie, Vilhelm Aubert, and Thomas Mathiesen.
Ragnar Frisch, who was professor of economics and statistics at the Faculty of Law from 1931 and also served as its dean, founded the discipline of econometrics and coined the terms macroeconomics/microeconomics, and was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969.
The Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law is the second-oldest institution in the world in this field.
In front of Domus Media, statues of Peter Andreas Munch and Anton Martin Schweigaard are displayed.
Among those who received the prize in Domus Media are Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), Mother Teresa (1979), Desmond Tutu (1984), and the 14th Dalai Lama (1989).
For the first one and a half century of its existence, the Faculty of Law was not organised into departments, but rather centered on each chair.
The establishment of the departments was supported by generous grants from shipping magnate (and lawyer) Anders Jahre.
Students of criminology, sociology of law or some specialized fields are affiliated with a department, however.
The centre is cross-disciplinary, and its staff includes lawyers, social scientists, and philosophers.
The Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law is the second oldest institution in this field in the world.
Historically, the rector of the university, elected among all the professors, was ex officio also dean of his own faculty.
A small number of employees hold the title forsker (researcher) and usually have no teaching obligations; their formal qualifications may vary from the assistant professor level to the full professor level.
Its alumni hence includes the vast majority of the country's preeminent legal professionals, including academics, supreme court justices, senior civil servants, and a large number of politicians, among them 11 Prime Ministers and many cabinet ministers.
