162 A relativist surrender like this would, however, deprive us of all means of determining the important forces behind the change; delimiting the moment of change temporally enables one to connect the legal change to more concrete social phenomena. Furthermore, there is a substantial argument for the periodization I amabout to emphasize: the decades of the 1850s and the 1860s indeed did see significant, not to say radical, changes as compared to the preceding period. In higher courts, as in the local ones, the practice of straightforwardly convicting on persuasive circumstantial evidence became the rule. Parallel with this development, the use of the middle categories of decision declined rapidly, although with a slight delay. Before reviewing the case material, however, a few methodological observations ought to be made. The Case Material and the Method of Inquiry Court records do not read like an open book. As Kemppinen shows in his work on the Finnish Supreme Court in the 1900s, the wording of court decisions is a mystical matter, full of tradition-laden expressions and meanings not always easy to decipher.‘ The formulations, of course, change in time, as courts not only reflect reality by language but also create reality. As Kemppinen puts it, “As multifaceted series of occurrences, fromcollective bargaining to discussions between drunkards are dressed in a uniformlinguistic costume, information on howthe occurrences are to be conceived is, at the same time, conveyed to the reader.”^ As in the period under scrutiny in Kemppinen’s study, in the nineteenth century the court decisions and discussions were recorded in legal phraseology, or formulas. Self-evidently, court records are a mere representation, pressed into the mold of judicial formulas, of what really goes on in a court session. Not only is evidence dressed in the categories of legal proof, but also statements of parties and witnesses tend to be surprisingly uniformas to their outer shape and their wording. As for the case material of this study, this observation is made even clearer for several reasons that do not have to do directly with bureaucratic needs. First, the court minutes were kept by the judge, who often came from the upper social classes'* and often had, necessarily, no accurate picture of the Kemppinen 1992 pp. 357—361. ^ “Kun monenkirjavat tapahtumasarjat tvöehtosopimusneuvotteluista humalaisten keskusteluihin puetaan yhdenmukaistavan kielen asuun, lukijalle viestitetään samalla tieto siitä, miten tapahtumat on hahmotcttava.” Ibid. p. 390. ■* Until the 1870s, an overwhelming majority of the students of the Imperial Czar Alexander’s University came from the upper social strata; with the immense growth in the number of students, that started in the 1870s, the relations began to change. Klinge — Knapas - Leikola — Strömberg 1989 pp. 317-320, 785-790.
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