The tolerance of Saami culture and legal thinking in Norwegian Supreme Court rulings. The clash between an oral and a text based legal culture

摘要

A major problem for all indigenous peoples who live under the legal rule of a majority populationis that their legal culture is often based on oral traditions, which suffer because of the text-basedlegal culture of the majority population. After a brief historic review of the relations between theSaami and the Norwegians, the author discusses the significance of Saami customary law andother elements of Saami legal thinking. The author discusses whether traditional elements fromSaami culture could be of relevance in future court cases by analyzing the use of analogous materialin a ruling from the Canadian Supreme Court. In the main part of the article, the author discusseswhether or not important rulings from the Norwegian Supreme Court concerning the Saamihave taken Saami legal thinking in consideration. The author concludes that the recent SupremeCourt rulings in the Selbu and Svartskog cases mark a new age for the significance of Saami legalthinking, and their cultural heritage.