Communicating Justice Providing Legitimacy: The Legal Practices of Swedish Administrative Courts in Cases Regarding Sickness Cash Benefit

by Sara Stendahl

This is a Ph.D. dissertation. This book is on an overarching level confronting the function of the legal system in the governance of modern welfare states. The point of departure is an analysis in which the conflict between individual needs and collective social risks is highlighted, and the role of the courts in resolving this conflict, is in focus. The work continues to an analysis relevant to three different areas of 1) Law and governance in modern welfare states and the role played by the legal system as a provider of legitimacy, 2) The Swedish response to the crisis of the 1990s, the introduction of the "concentration policy," the tightening of the criteria of "sickness" and "capacity for work" and the reflection of these policy changes in legal practices, 3) The role of legal science in the debate on social and economic policies and their implementation. Overall, the study concludes that the Swedish administrative courts system could be described as an efficient implementation machinery in which social policies are punctuated promptly; but it is also concluded that the administrative courts have a potential capacity to practice law in a way that could increase the sustainability of the welfare state project and that this potential is far from being fully exploited at present.

433 pages, Hardcover