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3 uisites the statutory theory of proof stood, it is equally indispensable to do so when attempting to understand why free evaluation of evidence replaced it. The Finnish development existed in no vacuumin this respect either; it is only by way of comparative work that the similarities to the international development, as well as national characteristics, if there are any, can be singled out. Apractical reason that forces one to employ comparative material is the fact that so little has been written about the development of the Swedish and Finnish law of proof. Compared to the enormous amount of volumes devoted to the history of criminal law and criminality, legal historians have - even on the international scale - had relatively little to say on criminal procedure and espedaily on the law of proof. Standard works on the development of the law of evidence include “La Preuve” (Parts I-IV, published by the Jean Bodin Society, Brussels, 1963-1965) and Jean-Philippe Lévy’s “La hierarchie des preuves dans le droit savant du moyen-age” (Lyon, 1939); Piero Fiorelli’s “La tortura giudiziaria nel diritto commune I-II” (Milan, 1953-1954) touches the law of evidence closely as well. Of the more recent ones, John Langbein’s comparative works on criminal procedure and judicial torture (“Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance. England, Germany, France,” Cambridge, 1974, and “Torture and the Law of Proof,” Chicago, 1976), and the articles by several authors in “Beiträge zumZeugenbeweis in Europa und den USA (18.-20. Jahrhundert)” (Frankfurt am Main, 1994) deserve mention. Insofar as Sweden is concerned, Göran Inger has published a two-volume work on the development of confession (“Das Geständnis in der schwedischen Prozessrechtsgeschichte 1. Bis zur Griindung des Svea Hofgerichts 1614,” Stockholm, 1976; and “Erkännandet i det svenska processrättshistoria II,” Stockholm, 1994).^ As for Finland, no comprehensive study on the history of the lawof proof exists, although Kevät Nousiainen’s “Prosessin herruus” (Helsinki, 1993) deals extensively with legal procedure in general. Not one of the treatises mentioned above, however, has taken the emergence of free evaluation of evidence in the nineteenth century as its focal point; even the articles of the “Beiträge” that are devoted to criminal evidence deal only with witness evidence. In fact, no general presentation of the nineteenth-century lawof proof exists. Perhaps there is not enough worthwriting about? If Langbein is correct, the decisive changes had in fact taken place gradually beginning two hundred years before the bourgeois revolutions.^ In France, legal rules of proof - or what was left of them- were abandoned as a direct result of the adoption of the jury system after the Revolution; the jury, not the law of proof, was the crux of the debates.^ ^ See also Inger’s article on the reception of statutory of proof in seventeenth-century Sweden (Inger 1984). ** Langbein 1976 pp. 45-60. On the jury discussion in the years following the revolution, Lombard 1993 pp. 149-156.

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