124 mainly chosen by the Germanist movement.In the 1840s, having seen that courts had actually started to make use of the Historical School’sJuristenrecht^ Savigny shifted his emphasis in an important way^^: he became an advocate of professional courts instead oi Professorenrecht, “professors’ law”; these courts, in Savigny’s opinion, could then be freed from the constraints of the legal theory. The professionalization and a reinforced group identity were not the only major developments affecting the German lawyers in the first half of the nineteenth century, however. There was another significant current affecting the criminal procedure and the lawof proof and cuttingacross the lines of the legal profession - that of liberalism, a strain of thought with which the Germanistic movement is commonly associated, Romanists being viewed upon as the politically conservative wing of the Historical School.-^ Although the educated middle classes formed the most prominent group at the beginning of liberalism, and administrative and judicial bureaucracies the most significant cluster within the educated middle classes, the interests and goals of liberals and lawyers cannot be equated. By the beginning of the 1800s, lawyers had become one of the most significant groups within the German bourgeoisie or Mittelstand.-'^ Increasingly, members of the judiciary were recruited fromthe ranks of the Mittelstandon the basis of their legal education. As the guards of constitutionalism, judges remained in a critical position vis-dvis state bureaucracy all during the first half of the nineteenth century.-^' Ibid. pp. 134-135, 143. See Whitman 1990 p. 131. Savignv’s article proclaiming professional courts and free evaluation of evidence, originally written as the Prussian Minister of Justice in 1846, was published in 1858 bv the Goltdammer’s Arebiv, see Savignv 1858, especially pp. 481, 491. Ibid. p. 201. Liberalism, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, is not facile to determine. James Sheehan has proposed that liberalismbe conceived of a family of ideas and behaviour patterns which overlap more or less, enabling the modern observer to recognize a liberal much the same wav as the contemporary liberals recognized each other. On a rather abstract level, then, most liberals saw themselves as spokesmen for both political progress and spiritual enlightenment at the same time. Although the first beginnings of liberalismcan be dated to the last third of the eighteenth centurv, the termitself was not applied until the 1820s; Sheehan 1978 pp. 5—7. In this study, the term“bourgeoisie” is used - as it was in the contemporary usage of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - synonymously with “Mittelstand” or “middle classes” to refer to a conglomerate of three groups: first, the oldest group, which consisted of burghers as an estate; and second, the owners and directors of large businesses. This second and the third group, the academically trained universit}’ professors and representatives of free trades, artists and intellectuals {Bildungsbiirgertum), were a novelty of the late 1700s. Kocka 1987 pp. 23—24. See also Vierhaus 1987 p. 64, who speaks of “biirgcrliche Schichten” or “ ‘mittlcren’ Teilen der Gesellschaft” and defines them as those middle strata of societv that no longer formed an estate, but could not vet be considered a class. Cf. Bell 1994. Rueschemeyer 1973 p. 150. 3' Hattenhauer 1980 pp. 283-287; McClelland 1991 p. 41. 27
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=