Vestfold og Telemark in the context of "Telemark"

There are 15 counties in Norway. The 15 counties are administrative regions that are the first-level administrative divisions of Norway. The counties are further subdivided into 357 municipalities (Norwegian: kommune). The island territories of Svalbard and Jan Mayen are outside the county divisions and they are ruled directly from the national level. The capital city of Oslo is both a county and a municipality.

In 2017, the Solberg government decided to abolish some of the counties and to merge them with other counties to form larger ones, reducing the number of counties from 19 to 11, which was implemented on 1 January 2020. This sparked popular opposition, with some calling for the reform to be reversed. The Storting voted to partly undo the reform on 14 June 2022, with Norway to have 15 counties from 1 January 2024. Three of the newly merged counties, namely Vestfold og Telemark, Viken and Troms og Finnmark, were dissolved and the old counties existing before the reform re-established with a few minor changes as some municipalities merged across former county borders and some switched counties during the 2020 local government reform (Regionreformen i Norge [no]).

Vest-Telemark (lit. 'West-Telemark') is a traditional district in Norway. The 7,699-square-kilometre (2,973 sq mi) area comprises the western areas of the larger region known as Upper Telemark (Norwegian: Øvre Telemark) in Vestfold og Telemark county. The region consists of six municipalities: Fyresdal, Tokke, Vinje, Nissedal, Kviteseid, and Seljord. In 2020, there were 13,903 residents in the region. The area of Vest-Telemark was historically called Øvre Telemark vestfjelske.

The region is known for its folk traditions within music, clothing, handcrafts, food, and architecture. The region is also distinctly marked by its dialects of Norwegian. This form of Norwegian is among those containing the most traces of the Old Norse language and grammar. This area uses the Nynorsk written form of Norwegian.

The Agder Court of Appeal (Norwegian: Agder lagmannsrett) is one of six courts of appeal in the Kingdom of Norway. The Court is located in the town of Skien. The court has jurisdiction over the counties of Vestfold og Telemark and Agder (except for Sirdal Municipality which falls under the Gulating Court of Appeal). These areas constitute the Agder judicial district (Norwegian: Agder lagdømme). This court can rule on both civil and criminal cases that are appealed from one of its subordinate district courts. Court decisions can be, to a limited extent, appealed to the Supreme Court of Norway. The court has 21 judges and 13 administrative staff, including a director. The chief judicial officer of the court (Norwegian: førstelagmann) is currently Dag Bugge Norden. The court is administered by the Norwegian National Courts Administration.