Eric Bylander

Project summary

Leave to appeal in the highest courts – a study in legal scholarship

Leave to appeal means that a higher court, such as the Supreme Court, decides that a judgment or decision appealed to it should be reviewed. Requiring leave to appeal is a way of ensuring that higher courts can focus on decisions that appear to be incorrect or on cases that may provide guidance for the determination of future cases. Decisions on leave to appeal are based on a simplified preliminary assessment and are accompanied only by standardised reasons. As a result, it is difficult for applicants to know how best to formulate an application for leave to appeal. This also makes it more difficult for courts to take account of their own previous decisions on leave to appeal and for other stakeholders, such as the legislature, to assess how the rules governing leave to appeal function in practice.

 

The central questions addressed by the project are: How does the system of leave to appeal in Sweden’s highest courts function compared with how it is intended to function, and how can the system best be designed to fulfil its various purposes? Despite the importance of these questions, very little research has been conducted in this area. However, the project builds on a strong foundation provided by a Ragnar Söderberg research project, now nearing completion, on leave to appeal in the intermediate appellate courts – the courts of appeal and the administrative courts of appeal.

 

An important part of the project is to compare Sweden’s different highest courts with one another and with the intermediate appellate courts. International equivalents will also be examined. The project is primarily concerned with procedural law but touches on many different areas of law, giving it broader significance for legal scholarship.