149 cendance of the liberal-minded Alexander II to the Russian throne in 1855, Finland was a country on the verge of drastic social, economic, and legal changes.-^ Ehrström sensed this, and in his vehement inaugural speech, the newprofessor strongly emphasized the important role that the legal profession had to play in order to ensure a legal “development that corresponds to the demands of the time” {“tidsenliga utveckling”). After a long “stateless night,” the statutes of the country were outdated and in desperate need of repair: “It is, indeed, a sad thought, but we must not hide it from ourselves: that we, during the past half a century, have fallen far behind the other nations as far as educational matters are concerned. To those areas, where we have thus slept away our time, belongs especially our legal development. Let us Finnish jurists, whose responsibility it first and foremost would have been to demand this development, lav our hand on our heart and openly admit that we have during the past half a century done almost nothing to demand such a development, and that we have almost completely ignored the great cultural work that has been undertaken, during this time, in the area of legal science and legislation by the world’s greatest cultural people, and that they have given their laws and institutions a development worthy of the level of cultivation that they have reached in other matters.”-^ Ehrströmdemanded that the fruits of the flourishing foreign legal literature, in whose production “legal scholars and practicing jurists most actively [had] competed,” be used in the domestic scholarly works as well, not blindly and slavishly forcing the results of the foreign legal science on the Finnish people, but by accommodating through an “assimilation process” the new principles to be part of the “nation’s own legal consciousness” {rättsmedvetande, Rechtsgefiihl)^^ — much as Ehrström himself had done in “Om företrädet.” Ehrström’s concern for the legal corps’s importance in the new phase of national development had practical consequences, as he was one of the driving forces behind the founding of Finland’s first professional legal organization, Finland’s Legal Asst')ciation (Juridiska Föreningen i Finland), in 1862.-*^ To that we shall return in a later chapter (see Chapter 15). Ylikangas 1986 p. 113; Kekkonen 1987 pp. 38-44. “Det är väl en sorglig tanke, men vi f.å icke dölja den för oss själva: att vi under senaste halvsekel blivit mveket efter andra nationer i bildning. Till ämnen, vilka vi sålunda sovit bort vår tid, hör i synnerhet vår rättsutveckling. Må vi finska jurister, vilka det närmaste hade ålegat att befordra denna utveckling, lägga handen på hjärtat och öppet bekänna, att vi under det senaste halvseklet nästan ingenting gjort för att befordra densamma, och att vi nästan helt och hållet ignorerat det stora kulturarbete, som under tiden inom rättsvetenskapen och lagstiftningen pågått hos världens förnämsta kulturfolk samt ät deras lagar och institutioner givit utveckling, värdig den ståndpunkt i bildning, vartill de uti andra ämnen hunnit.” Ehrström 1962 pp. 79-80. -s Ibid. pp. 81-82. On the historv of Juridiska Föreningen i Finland, see Grotenfelt 1912 and Godenhielm 1962.
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