RB 54

152 both institutions have been abandoned in the contemporary juristic writing and legislation. For him, unless the accused is considered innocent until proven guilty, then “lawcontradicts itself. Although Ehrstrom’s influence on the students may have been considerable during the lengthy and decisive period he alone was responsible for the teaching of criminal procedure in the country’s sole institution of academic learning, it would be an exaggeration, to be sure, to claim that Ehrstrom ushered Finnish criminal procedure into the modern era. His published texts can be interpreted, at the most, as allusions to a thorough modernization of criminal procedure, and it seems that he never got to publishing the thoughts that are clearly present in his lectures on the reform of criminal procedure. One of the official implications in that direction was his activity in the field of substantive criminal law (see Chapter 14); his formulations of criminal liability require a modern conception of theories of proof. Thus, I infer that Ehrstromwas, by the 1860s at least, in favor of free evaluation of evidence, and of the jury as well. Since his thoughts remained largely unpublished and not expressly formulated, fromthe general point of view all this is, however, mere insinuation and the embryo of modern procedural thinking. Even taking into consideration the fact that in the decisive period of change the transformation may have been backed by Ehrstrom’s almost revolutionary teaching proclaiming free evaluation of evidence and a jury system,‘^° one of the characteristic traits of Finnish legal history is the extremely weak role played by legal science in the modernization of procedural lawin the nineteenth century. Whereas in other countries - Germany, France, and Sweden - scholars played a pivotal part in criticizing existing procedural laws and shaping new alternativ^es through their debates, in Finland no such open debate occurred. The changes were carried through mainly by way of judicial practice, and after scientific procedural law was created in the 1890s, the solutions adopted by the legal practice sifted, partially and little by little, into the scholarship. Other Authors on Criminal Procedure The silence after Ehrstrom and before the 1890s was not a complete one, however; in 1867 Robert Montgomery*' wrote an article critizing the purgatory oath (“On the Purgatory Oath in Criminal Cases,” “Om värjemålseden i brottmål”) and in 1880 another, “On the Accusatory Principle in the Newest Ibid. pp. 591-593. Ehrstrom was professor from 1860—1877. Of course we do not know for sure, however, whether all of his teaching was as revolutionary as the crossed-out part of the manuscript from 1867 suggests. On Montgomery, see Klami 1977 pp. 24, 66-67.

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