497 populated and proletarianized areas on the flat plains of the south than in the forest districts of the north. In order to point out some important factors which have played a crucial role, then the economic and social developments should be placed at the forefront. When the local community became more heterogeneous, it also found it more difficult to maintain justice in the same formas previously. Many patterns can be traced back to the social transition. The centralization and increased importance of central government are partially a result of this change, partially a more complicated phenomenon. Yet this left traces everywhere in the work of the courts. Society became more professionalized and more thoroughly bureaucratized, which influenced the balance of power within the courts. The hope grew that it would be possible, with the aid of the in modern Sweden much worn concept of “social engineering”, to be able to use new laws to help solve this problem. During one periocf religion came to be an important guiding rule for the administration of justice, while later on secularised “rational reasoning” was in control. To uniformly take a stand on the question as to whether the legal systemhas been an instrument of conflict or consensus would, to my way of thinking, be to distort reality. We often use concepts like; “central government” or “the State” to denote opposites to the local community. This “state” is in actual fact not an organism with an unequivocal will topping particular interests, even if it, now and then, has been described as though that were the case. The State can, as is the case with the courts, also be cfescribed as an arena or an instrument at a high level for different parties who attempt to forward their interests. This does not exclude that the abstract concept of the state, by virtue of its existance mthe ideological world, has influenced political reality. To a certain extent the courts’ work was always concerned with settling disputes. Sometimes these disputes were solved by mutual agreement, even together with the party who was the defendant, sometimes by pure repression. Justice is an instrument which serves many purposes. One of the most important changes ditf perhaps take place during the 19th century when it started to be used to a greater extent to reform divergent individuals. One of the laws’ greatest contradictions today lies between conflict-solving and individual therapy. While the local community in the 17th century primarily emphasized the solving of conflicts and, occasionally, the deterrent effect, we discuss if one can sentence somebody to social or mental improvement — if punishment is a social medicine. History shows the roots of this discussion and how earlier communities tried to solve their problems. 32
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