104 tomatically, Nehrman remained virtually silent on leuteration. As we have seen, he made no exceptions, however, as to the applicability of the legal rules of proof, and he remained silent on the institution oi poena extraordinaria. As Thunander has shown, however, the wishes of the legislator or legal treatise writers did not necessarily correspond well to the judicial practice, which at times greatly deviated from the letter of the law.^^ Thus, if there were “creative” elements in Nehrman, they are to be found in the way he systematized and presented the statutory material. Nehrman pressed the procedure of the Law of 1734 into an international ins commune mold. It was, thus, divided into inquisitio specialis and generalis, with different degrees of proof needed to proceed on to each stage. In sum, two basic currents can be observed in Nehrman’s writings on the law of proof. First, Nehrman - like his predecessors Ralamb and Kloot in the previous century - wished to portray the criminal procedure divided into continental-style ius commune sequences {inquisitio generalis/specialis) and its rules of proof into the categories probatio plena, semiplena maior, and semiplena. In this respect, it made no difference that the basic legal ideology had changed from Roman law to natural law. The Roman-canon rules of proof could well fit the world view of an eighteenth-century legal mind, as they seemed to pass the “test” of natural law. The models, both before and after the promulgation of the Swedish Lawof 1734, were taken fromthe continental ius commune. The main difference between the theories of Ralamb and Kloot, on one hand, and Nehrman, on the other hand, was in the depth of penetration of the Roman-canon theory. Paradoxically, Nehrman, the fierce opponent of Roman law, did what the actual Roman law-inspired legal thinkers never accomplished by bringing the Roman-canon doctrine of proof to its perfection in Swedish legal literature. Second, although Nehrman’s texts follow closely the letter of the Law of 1734, to ascribe a “pre-positivism” the period^"^ carries an anachronistic connotation. Clearly, it was Nehrman’s aimto support the powerholders in their attempt to further centralize judicial power and to delegate the least possible amount of power to the lower courts by, among other means, limiting the judiciary’s roomof maneuver with the help of binding rules of proof. In this sense, Nehrman’s works can be seen as tools of the “judicial revolution,” or as one of the ways of disciplining the undisciplined, the lower courts. Thunander 1993 pp. 195-203. According toJägcrskiöld, the conception of legal sources became more and more statutorily oriented since the 1680s; the development culminated in the Law of 1734 and Nehrman. Jägcrskiöld has described the post-1734 period as that of a “national positivism where statutes emerge as the only sources of law.” Jägcrskiöld 1963 pp. 209-213.
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