Introduction “The court shall, after carefully considering all presented circumstances, decide what shall be held as truth in a case.”' With this paragraph from the year 1948, the reign of the statutory theory of proof that had lasted about 300 years finally became legal history in Finland. In seventeenth-century Sweden, of which Finland was a part until 1809, the influence of continental ins commune had led to a reception of the Roman-canon rules of proof. According to these rules, a confession or two eyewitnesses were needed as evidence for conviction in a criminal case. The legal rules of proof were then taken as the basis of the statutory law of proof in the Swedish Lawof 1734. But just as it would be misleading to declare that statute the beginning of the statutory theory of proof in Sweden (and Finland), it would be equally misleading to attribute the end of the theory to the statute of 1948, for legal historians have always been aware of the fact that the statute of 1948 only marked the change of a legal practice in Finland that had occurred considerably earlier. It is the principal aim of the present study to find out when that transformation took place and why. Warning legal historians of the mistakes caused by an excessively narrow nationalist-oriented research tradition, and calling for broad comparisons, Harold Berman maintains that “Nationalist legal historiography is incapable of providing an understanding of the basic changes that have taken place in the Western legal systems in the past.” Therefore, legal historians must move on the largest possible scale and proceed “in the widest possible context.”2 This study builds on no systematic large-scale comparisons,^ nor does it aim at a general theory-building regarding the historical development of the law of evidence. Nevertheless, during the course of the research work the fact has clearly emerged that no meaningful study on the development of legal spheres so limited as Sweden or Finland makes sense without placing the research object in a larger context. Well into the nineteenth century, and even thereafter,"^ law was an international science, the “results” of which fluctuated freely from ‘ Procedural Code, 17 Chapter, 2 section, 1 article. - Berman 1993 pp. 31-33. Charles Tilly classifies comparative methods into individualizing, universalizing, variationfinding, ancf encompassing comparisons; see Tilly 1984 pp. 80-84. In this classification, mv method of comparison would most conveniently be classified as individualizing as it seeks to find out what distinctive properties Finnish law of proof had in comparison with the French, German, and Swedish developments, and to explain those features. On the other hand, in order to arrive at the singular characteristics, one has to establish the common, “universal” ones. On the European imcommune, see the already elassical works of Koschaker (1953), Wieacker (1967), and Coing (1985). RecentK' a new discussion on the possibilitv of building a new common
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