138 is not even in “Ireland, France, Belgium, Portugal ... [or] the United States” considered the best solution “among the most enlightened part of the people.” Therefore, Kreiiger suggests that the right to freely evaluate evidence be granted to the professional judiciary. As control measures, Kretiger proposes public trials and a responsibility of the judiciary to state the grounds for their decisions.2° By granting free evaluation of evidence to the judiciary, as we saw above, he seems to support the existingpractice. In the legal literature, it was in the work by Wilhelm Uppström (“Öfversigt af straffprocessrätten enligt främmande och svensk rätt” or “Overviewof the law of criminal procedure in foreign and Swedish law”) in 1884 that Swedish scholarly literature was finally rid of the vestiges of the legal theory - at least insofar as the level of criminal policy was concerned, for the statutory implementation would still take decades.-^ In the following decade the legislative reforms were taken up again. In the 1870s a thorough reform of the Law of 1734 began. As a result, in 1884 a reformproposal concerning both civil and criminal procedure was prepared. The proposal was built on the foundations of modern criminal procedure, with the French post-revolutionary procedure as its model. Although rather throughly discussed in the proposal, the institution of the trial jury was not seriously considered any more.“ The proposal was slowed down in the other law-drafting organs, and so were several other proposals. In the main, the opposition can be localized in the upper chamber of the Parliament and to the conserv’atives in general. The enormity of a complete procedural reformseems to have frustrated the efforts as well. The Procedural Commission set up in 1911 finally managed to draft a proposal in 1926. On the basis of this proposal, a new Procedural Code was then prepared. It was sanctioned in 1942, and it entered into force in 1948. As a partial reform, absolutio ab instantia had been abolished in 1934.^3 Although free evaluation of evidence thus came to prevail over the legal theory of proof in the Swedish jurisprudence, judicial practice, and legislation as the century advanced, the meager attempts to establish trial juries in Sweden bore no corresponding fruit. While explaining the reluctance of the 1849 Commission to introduce trial juries in Sweden, Sjöholm has, among other factors, referred to the existence of the nämnd systemas a channel through which the possible reformpressures were directed.-"^ Although this may well be true, one Kreiiger 1861 pp. 143-144. Interestingly, the theme of alternative procedural safeguards does not coincide with the breakthrough of free evaluation of evidence in Finland. ■2* Uppström1884. As far as civil procedure is concerned, the corresponding works were written by Ivar Afzelius (1879) and Gustaf Broome (1890). -- Sjöholm 1972 p. 98; Inger 1994 pp. 252-254. Ibid. pp. 250-264. Sjöholm 1972 pp. 99-100.
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