95 state and has here been considered an important procedural facet of the “judicial revolution.” In this respect, the history of the Swedish law of proof follows international development. In Sweden, the statutory theory of proof took a peculiar form, however. In continental Europe, the legal theory of proof was part of the formation and reception of ius commune, common learned law. In Sweden, however, one cannot talk about a learned body of legal professionals until the late 1600s, and even then mainly to the limited extent of the high courts. Swedish legal procedure was - and has remained until the present in both Sweden and Finland — a lay-dominated process. In such a system, the legal theory of proof such as it developed with all its sophisticated details in continental theory could not be absorbed. In contemporary Swedish legal literature and legal practice we run into a simplified, untheoretical version of the legal theory of proof. The establishment of a hierarchical court systemwith high courts as supervisers of the local hundred and town courts provided the necessary framework for the centralized judiciary to function. Within this framework, legal rules of proof played an indispensable part: their observation could be controlled in a completely different way from that of the archaic systemof proof, based on oaths and oath-helpers. Thus, the legal theory of proof can be seen as one of the ways in which the centralized judicial administration wished to take over conflict resolution that until then, to a large extent, had rested on the local communities. Regardless of its untheoretical nature, the Swedish legal theory of proof, as far as its essential features are concerned, followed continental models quite closely. As elsewhere, the statutory theory of proof was adopted in Sweden with certain complements that helped to ensure the realization of criminal liabity in cases where guilt seemed certain but full proof was lacking. Among these were absolutio ab instantia, poena extraordinaria, and the gradually developing confessional imprisonment. In the background of these international developments, a major change in the idea of probability occurred as the rigid Aristotelian world viewwas abandoned in favor of an empiricist and probabilistic view in the seventeenth century. This same kind of epistemological change occurred in Sweden’s universities and its intellectual climate towards the end of the seventeenth century. It seems logical to suppose that the collapse of Aristotelianism as the dominant scientific philosophy served as a background for the adoption of legal theory of proof, not in the strict medieval form, but with the early modern complements of the theory. In the Sweden of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the struggle for legal power between the Crown and the courts of different levels is well mirrored in institutions such as absolutio ab instantia and poena extraordinaria, for they tended to enlarge the judiciary’s scope of discretion at the cost of the
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