163 life of those present in court. Second, court discussions and decisions were until the very last years of the century recorded in Swedish, the official court language and most often the mother tongue of the judge, and not in Finnish, the language in which the speaking in most courts took place.^ Even though the nämndcmen - the lay court members - were locals and, therefore, had no problem understanding what went on in the courts, we do not know exactly how much of the details and nuances of the local dialects was conveyed to the judges themselves.^ There is, however, no getting behind the text of the court records. The records, fromthe point of viewof this study, fulfill two functions, and consequently, two kinds of problems surface. First, since court records arc a reconstruction of a social reality, or better, a reconstruction of somebody’s description of it, we could suspect that the reconstruction was perhaps not an altogether faithful one, or that it could even have been used to distort reality.^ As for the law of proof, this could, for instance, mean omissions or alterations of witnesses’ or the accused’s statements, or fabrications of statements not actually made by witnesses or the parties to the case.^ Fortunately, no systematic alteration or falsifying of statements can be observed in the nineteenth-century Finnish court records that I have studied. Statements contrary to the court’s decision have regularly been recorded as well, although they rarely appear in a court’s arguments; this makes it indispensable to go through the whole record. Furthermore, the appeals letters written by accused persons included in the court records confirmthe conclusion. Save for a few exceptions, the appellants do not claim that the court’s records have been inaccurately or fraudulently kept. If they had, the appeals letters would certainly mention the problem. There are, however, clear differences between courts and parties as to what kind of statements were to be understood as confessions or eyewitness statements. Second, the court record represents and formulates a legal reality. The legal theory of proof, in a way, resided in the court records. The prevalent conception of law was written into the very court records, and it is in them that it changed. The judiciary’s notion of the law of proof determined and affected ^ The Swedish-speaking coastal areas are, of course, an exception to this. Nevertheless, classified by the language in which they had taken their secondary education, at the end of the 1860s only 5.5 %of the all the students at the University were Finnish-speaking. In the 1870s, because of the increase of the amount of students in general, the linguistic ratio began to change dramatically. Ibid. p. 773. In the very last years of the period included in this study, the 1890s, court records in Finnish start to appear and a Finnish legal phraseology begins to take shape. One notices, however, an effort to remedy this problem by inserting direct quotations of idiomatic expressions in Finnish into the court records. ^ MacNcil warns of the “fallacy that the words of legal historical discourse actually re-present, in an unmediated manner, legal historical reality.” MacNeil 1995 p. 188. ^ For example, Kaiser reports judiciary having falsified court records in the Russian criminal procedure of the early nineteenth century. Kaiser 1972 pp. 78—79.
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