Sten Rudholm

Sten John Gustaf Rudholm (27 April 1918 – 29 November 2008) was a Swedish lawyer, member of the Swedish Academy (Chair No.1), former Chancellor of Justice, Chief Justice of Appeal and Marshal of the Realm. Prior to his death, Rudholm was the only living Swedish non-royal to have been made Knight of the Royal Order of the Seraphim – the foremost order of Sweden.

Sten Rudholm was born in 1918 at Karlstad. He graduated in law in 1942 in . His career in the judiciary was largely associated with the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm. After training as a judicial registrar and qualifying service as a public prosecutor, he was appointed public prosecutor in 1945 – a natural career to judgeship.

Having co-authored Handbok för nämndemän (Handbook for jurors) in 1949, Rudholm became an appeal court judge in 1954 and a justice of appeal in 1961. He crowned his judicial career in 1967 with the position of President of the Svea Court of Appeal – by tradition and protocol the highest ranking position of the Swedish judiciary. Serving as President of the Court of Appeals, Rudholm was last non-royal Swedish citizen to be awarded the Order of the Seraphim.

Rudholm's career as a judge came to overlap with duties as a public official in various appointments. In 1955–1961, Rudholm was the head of the legal section at the Ministry of Justice, drafting and scrutinising new bills for presentation to the Riksdag. Meanwhile, in 1959–1963, he served as a judicial expert for the Constitutional Commission. The commission had been set up in 1954 and was chaired by former prime minister Rickard Sandler, to conduct an overall review of the Swedish constitution. After nine years, in 1963, the Commission submitted its first proposal for a new constitution. In an initiated article, Rudholm and the constitutional lawyer Nils Stjernquist, describe the Commission's political and judicial complications. The article gives a picture of Sten Rudholm as a skilled writer, which can be divided into two: the writer of legal text, with a considerable volume of diverse and more or less anonymous texts in e.g. penal law and public law, and the free writer, which emerges above all during his years as journal editor.

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