Nye bidrag til eiendomshistorien i Finnmark

Abstract

Abstract The property history and constitutional affiliation of Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, differs significantly from that of the rest of the country, insofar as a dominant conception up to the present time has been that the government has been the owner of Finnmark «from the earliest times». Despite significant research during the last half decade, there is still a prevailing opinion that private ownership in Finnmark originated through a normative act of the Government in Copenhagen in 1775. The theme of this article is to study the property history of Finnmark with an aim to examine the existence of private property independently of the government land acts. The article argues that new research and sources not previously consulted, which are relevant for the property history of Finnmark, must be used to a greater extent in the legal clarification process in Finnmark. Although state ownership has been questioned for a long period, the arguments for the existence of private property that is not derived from state ownership have encountered an insurmountable threshold due to the absence of documentation. Through use of sources previously not applied in a property law context, the article sheds new light on the property history of Finnmark.