103 Nehrman’s framework of action was different. First of all, the number of legal writers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was small: fewer than one per generation per discipline. The fewworks published certainly did not form a body of legal scholarship solid enough to provide any scholarly back-ground for a practicing lawyer. Second, the few works that deal with procedure - and Nehrman’s is an accurate example of this - do not usually penetrate deep into interpreting the legal texts; therefore, they can best be described as handbooks for laymen and lay judges. Albeit neatly decorated with Latin terminology borrowed from foreign authors (different kinds of singularitatis, the categorization of proof, the distinction inquisitiogencralis/specialis), they are not works of juristic writing in the modern sense or even in the sense of the contemporary continental literature. The principal aim of Nehrman’s books was, thus, not to interpret the law, but rather to present it in an easily comprehensible way and, perhaps, to offer a general justification for the legal order. Therefore, the early modern Swedish law books must not be taken as close descriptions of what went on in the courts. In general, Nehrman make little reference to court practice. At best, the treatises tell something of the way their author wished lawto be read, and how it was to be conceived as part of the natural order of things. But, although Nchrman borrowed much of his terminology and systematics fromforeign authors, he was no mere mediator of ideas. Instead, like his predecessors in the sixteenth century, Nehrman actively chose to include some parts of the continental theories and to exclude others. This process of selection was not based on coincidence, but on conscious politics. In a state that was centralized to a relatively high extent as in eighteenth-century Sweden, legal measures delegating power to lower judiciary, such as poena extraordinaria, were not desirable, especially since the makers of legal decisions were unlearned and, therefore, unpredictable and difficult to control. For the same reason, it may be supposed, no lower standard of proof for delicta levia appears in the Lawof 1734 or in the works of Nehrman. Nehrman’s lawof proof appears, then, strict and uncompromising when compared to contemporary continental juristic writing, although we know that the Swedish legal practice did not differ materially fromits German or French counterparts insofar as the relaxation of medieval statutory theory of proof was concerned. Insofar as Nehrman’s fondness for natural law tends to create a radical image of him, it is deceiving. As with Swedish natural law in general, Nehrman’s natural law was state-centered and conservative. Nehrman remained close to the letter of the Law of 1734, and seemed to allow no exceptions to the applicabilitv of the legal rules of proof. For Nehrman, the law of proof was to be applied with no exceptions to criminal and civil cases alike, and to both petty and severe crimes. Strict adherence to the letter of the lawnecessarily meant, in Nehrman, that judicial practice was left less discretion. Symp-
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