Allemansrätten och marknyttjande : Studier av ett rättsinstitut

Sammanfattning: The topic studied in this thesis is the right of public access as a legal institution. In that connection, several questions which are different from each other are raised. The thesis focuses to a great extent on the interaction between questions of a practical-legal nature and those whose character is more connected to legal theory. The point of departure of the discussion in the thesis is that some of the legal norms that are incorporated in the institution of the right of public access are customary law. Thus, the concept customary law is particularly considered, and the question of in what way the customary law can be filled with content raises special interest. A hypothesis is put forward in the thesis, which is that the right of public access constitutes part of those regulations whose purpose is that land should be used appropriately - seen from the societal perspective that land is a limited natural resource which should be used expediently, for the husbanding of resources. What is advocated in this thesis, is that in both the jurisprudential discussion about the right of public access and in the argumentation that is conducted in the practical legal application, the three subjects, the Actual User, the Canalizer and the Actual User in the Collective and their different use of the land, are separated. Further, it is advocated that the discussion as to which activities are allowed by the right of public access should be based on a consciousness that the activities can concern “everyday use” or “recreation” and that, depending on whether the activities are considered to concern the one or the other, different conclusions regarding the permissibility of the activities will be drawn. Furthermore, it is shown in the thesis that in conflicts between different means of using land, the courts seem to presume that all land is covered by the right of public access - a presumption that does not hold if the land is a part of somebody’s zone of home privacy, is needed for certain business or constitute biologically sensitive land.