146 France led to harsh criticismof the criminal procedure of absolutism and its eventual revolutionary upheaval with the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, were lacking in the Finland of the early 1800s. No revolutionary liberal middle class appeared, and when changes in the law of proof began to take place from the middle of the century onwards, there were other reasons. As I intend to claim, the most significant of these was the appearance of a profession-like legal corps in a bureaucratic state dominated by a legal positivist ideology. This phenomenon is, as we have seen, not peculiar to Finland: it is already noticeable in post1815 Germany, and came to mark the development of the law of proof in Sweden, Germany, and France, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the social contradictions of the old Ständestaat, together with fervent liberalism, withered away and were replaced by newsocial juxtapositions. The Doctrine in Transition: K. G. Ehrström As for procedural writing, a long silence followed Calonius. In K. G. Ehrstrom’s^^ 1854 licentiate thesis, “Omföreträdet emellan ackusations- och inqvisitions-förfarandet i brottmdlsprocessen” (“On the priority between accusatory and inquisitory principles in criminal procedure”), which he wrote under the supervision of professor Johan Filip Palmén, the author recognizes the need to reformthe criminal procedure. The work for the “betterment” of the lawof proof and of court organization that had been done in both scholarship and statutory lawin other countries “sooner or later” had to be started in Finland, where most of the criminal legislation was centuries old. As has been noted before, the focal point of the German debates withwhich he was well acquainted - the question of the trial juries - seems largely to evade Ehrstrom’s attention. Although the author mentions the juries only in passing, his stance on that question can, nevertheless, be clearly deduced fromthe principal point he makes. Ehrström marks a clear break with the past and announces the coming of modernity. With reason, he can be regarded as one of Finland’s foremost legal modernizers. Paradoxically enough, in 1854 Ehrström was still ideologically closer to Montesquieu than were his German contemporaries. Or at least he appeared to be, for it is probable that Ehrström’s supervisor, Johan Filip Palmén,^° exercised a considerable influence on the writing of Ehstrdm’s disEhrström is regarded the modernizer of Finnish criminal law; see Wahlberg’s foreword in Ehrström 1994. On his role in the reformand codification of Finnish criminal law; see Blomstedt 1964 pp. 433-446; Backman 1976 pp. 54-55; Klami 1977 pp. 90-97; and Utriainen 1984 pp. 27-31. Palmén’s own writingshows that he was not to a least extent affected by liberal modern procedural thinking; Palmén 1859 pp. 237-242. On Palmén’s conservatism and his Savignyan influences, see Saastamoinen 1994 pp. 18—24, 31.
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