160 legal theory of proof, Calonius already emphasizes the importance of the judge’s personal conviction and the necessity of proportioning the amount of evidence needed to the gravity of the crime. As of that time, however, no question of modernizing criminal procedure arises in Calonius. In the 1850s and 1860s, the first manifestations of the commencing, but long and painful, modernization of Finnish criminal procedure appear in juristic writing — the timing, thus, coincides with the change in legal practice (see Chapters 12-13). Although no scholarly treatises on the lawof proof or questions of criminal procedure appear, related questions are taken up, albeit in passing, by some authors. Both Ehrström and Montgomery were clearly in favor of free evaluation of evidence, and Ehrströmof the establishment of trial juries as well. The discussions held in Finland’s Legal Association show that both reforms were, in general, deemed desirable by a largish number of Finland’s legal professionals. The “transitional” doctrine was on the verge of modernity. In the scholarly works, the need to reform the law of proof was connected to the division of the elements of the crime into objective and subjective ones in order to subjectify guilt determination. R. A. Wrede established procedural law as an independent branch of legal science in Finland in the 1890s. It was by him that the critique against legal rules of proof was, for the first time, systematically established in writing; his arguments were taken fromGerman and Swedish scholarly discussions, part of them decades old at the time of Wrede’s writing. Wrede’s problem was not whether to accept the reformative ideas of the modern liberal process. Instead, Wrede’s problemwas how to relate the modern ideas to the contrary written statute, formally still in force. To resolve the contradiction, Wrede — and his successors until the statutory change in 1948 - chose to present the desired statutory changes and the actual stance of the legal practice together with the out-dated text of the Lawof 1734. The modern ideas of evidence had been accepted by European legal science and the legislations of many countries long before the birth of the modern procedural doctrine in Finland. Even more importantly, however, at this time Finnish legal practice had already taken the decisive step towards the abolition of the legal rules of proof.
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