RB 54

139 ought not to ignore the fact as in Sweden no liberal bourgeoisie movement comparable to that of Germany’s existed. In Sweden, thus, the jury had no such social and political support that the institution had gained in Germany. It is, therefore, somewhat misleading to state (as Sjöholm does) that the Swedish theories over the origin of the jury institution should have had no “direct political connection.”-5 On the contrary, the very fact that the Germanist-type legal historical arguments in favor of the jury were not advanced in Sweden bears a political momentum to itself: there was, simply, no politically fertile ground and no need for an overtly political argumentation in favor of the jury in Sweden. Conclusion The history of legal evidence in Sweden and Finland shares fundamental similarities. Even after Finland’s separation fromSweden in 1809, the statutory law in both countries remained practically the same all the way until 1948, when the legal theory of proof was statutorily abolished in both countries. Both Finland and Sweden traditionally have had only a thin layer of legal professionalism; instead, the administration of justice in these countries has strongly relied on laymen. It seems that in both countries, the essential changes of the law of proof in criminal procedure occurred approximately at the same pace: the decisive change took place in Finland in the 1860s and 1870s, and this seems to have been the case in Sweden as well. By the turn of the century, practically no legal scholar in either country seriously questioned the need to rid the criminal procedure of the remnants of the Roman-canon law of proof.^^ It was, more than anything, the difficulty of pushing through a total reform of criminal procedure that kept the text of the PS unaltered both in Sweden and in Finland. But there are essential differences between the two countries as well. These dissimilarities have to do, on the one hand, with the institutional framework of legal discussion and, on the other hand, with background factors of a larger societal scale. As to the first, Sweden had a working, if not particularly flourishing, legal literature fromthe 1820s onwards. Legal treatises and Sweden’s first legal journal, Carl Schmidt’s Juridiska Arkif, kept the Swedish legal corps rather well acquainted with the development of law in continental European countries, most of all Germany. The new trends of the law of evidence and the jury soon made themselves noticed through these channels, and they acquired spokesmen of their own. By contrast, only in the 1860s could Finland boast of a legal dogmatic literature of its own,-^ and even then and until the last two decades of the century the works of legal science remained few and far ^5 Ibid. p. 100. Also in Denmark the pace ot the change was surprisingly similar; see Ravn 1980. Klami 1977 pp. 66-71. 27

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