2 country to country; as a practical and legislative activity, moreover, the reasons for the adoption of particular legal solutions tend to have similar, or at least comparable, needs and endeavors as their background. Therefore, I have found it necessary to include relatively large comparative parts in the work. The selection of France, Germany, and Sweden as objects of comparison may require an explanation. Because of a long, common history,^ I find the comparison between Finland and nineteenth-century Sweden inescapable. At the beginning of the last century, Finland and Sweden thus shared the roots of a common legal tradition. Thereafter, the paths of the two countries diverged in several ways which make the comparison interesting. Germany, in turn, was the cradle of Swedish and later Finnish legal science fromthe sixteenth century onwards. It was - and to a large extent still is - fromthere that Swedish and Finnish jurists drew their inspiration and statutory models. France, then, was one of the first important experimental fields for the medieval statutory theory of proof; it was in France that the European state first centralized to the degree that the creation of a hierarchical court system, to which the statutory theory of proof is intimately linked, became possible. Moreover, it was in France, after the Great Revolution, that free evaluation of evidence first substituted for the rules of legal proof. Strictly speaking, the point of departure for legal change under inspection in this study is the legal theory of proof such as it had developed in Finland in the first half of the nineteenth century. The student of great, fundamental transformations of the law of proof deals, however, with a legal history of longue durée^\ so fewand far between are the changes, so deeply connected to underlying social, political and ideological currents are they. The historical perspective of the present study is, therefore, necessarily a long one. I will start, although cursorily, in the twelfth century, when the statutory theory of proof first emerged. The purpose of this part of the study is to find out what social, political and ideological preconditions have been linked to the emergence of a theory of evidence that consists of binding rules. This will hopefully help to clarify why the legal theory of proof assumed the particular shape it did in seventeenth-century Sweden, and what factors helped support the theory until its decline in the nineteenth century. Without a rather thorough historical and international comparison, an attempt to comprehend the way the legal theory of proof was constituted and how it functioned in Finland at the beginning nineteenth century would run into insurmountable difficulties. If it is necessary to employ comparative material to find out on what prereqEuropean lawon the foundation of the shared heritage has been raised by Zimmermann (1991 and 1992). Critique has been voiced by Giaro (1993, 1994 a and 1995), Caroni (1994), and LettoVanamo - Tamm(1994). 5 Finland belonged to Sw-eden as its eastern province for more than 600 years, from the twelfth century until 1809. ^ On the history oi longue durée, see Braudel 1980 pp. 25-54.
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