RB 54

117 coincided timewise with the formation of a professional legal corps based on education. As in the neighboring country, in Germany there was, however, a close connection between the principles of orality and publicity, the free evaluation of proof, and the trial jury. In Germany, legal science entered into a decisive phase on its way to modernization as the Historical School of Lawgrouped around Friedrich Garl von Savigny from approximately 1810 on. As I hope to show below, the fact that the discussion was primarily a legal one and between legal professionals is significant and came to affect the essence of the debates. In this respect, there is a marked difference fromFrance, where the introduction of free evaluation of evidence was a political matter altogether, linked to the jury question. In France, the principles of the law of proof did not appear on the revolutionary agenda as independent questions at all; they depended wholly on the particular institutional solutions adopted regarding the organization of the judiciary. Because of the jurists’ markedly strong social role during the first half of the nineteenth century and owing to legal scholarship already flourishing in that period, Germany turns out to be an interesting legal historical laboratory. Whereas in Finland, my primary target of investigation, hardly any legal literature existed during the first half of the 1800s, in Germany, legal literature on almost every imaginable opinion and combination of ideas can be found. These attempts to solve the problems of German criminal procedure will, I hope, help to shed some light on the obscure points of the development of the Finnish lawof proof as well. In particular, one observation should warrant the reader’s attention. For a student of French legal history, free evaluation of evidence seems a logical consequence of the trial jury. However, despite the fact that this combination triumphed in post-1848 Germany as well, the jury was far from a self-evident outcome of the struggle. Whereas France experienced a Great Revolution not only as far as politics was concerned but also in criminal procedure, in Germanv the change was less abrupt. The intense scientific discussions on the English and French juries and the law of proof seemed to continue endlessly in the bountiful German legal literature and scientific journals of the Vormärz period. Although in manv ways 1848 marked a decisive turning point in the history of German criminal procedure, it was by no means as clear a dividing line as was 1789 in France. In several German states, circumstantial evidence and the negative theory of proof found legislative expressions even before the free evaluation of evidence rapidly replaced the statutory theory of proof in the individual German jurisdictions. In the following, I shall inquire into the German procedural literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. We will see that practically every different combination of legal theory and free evaluation of evidence on one hand, and trial jury and professional judiciary on the other, had their spokesmen in Ger-

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