Moving the focus to the case of Sweden, this ‘natural’ assumption of the supreme courts as being among the ‘judges’ becomes even more tenuous. The implicit scope of the work is to introduce reflections of a broader and more general character: to extrapolate from the Swedish case considerations that may be applicable to other European countries as to the question whether a supreme court with a fully judicial nature is a condition sine qua non for every democracy. A civil servant is part of the public service, but constitutes a much narrower category, not including the judges, as it identifies staff working in public administration, i.e., the apparatus of the state specifically devoted to the ‘management of public programs’. In a climate of value conflicts, supreme courts must often position themselves outside the various political, financial, social, and administrative systems in order to decide which value system is to be defended, based exclusively on the valid law.