192 The law of evidence in the PS of 1734 cannot be adequately dealt with using methods of modern legal interpretation, isolating the legal text fromits own context.Amodern legal professional cannot safely hope to reconstruct “the law” on the basis of a statute text only; insofar as premodern texts, such as the Law of 1734, The premodern jurist was, obviously, not dependent on the text of the law only, nor were his methods of textual interpretation the same as the modern theory of legal interpretation. Any modern interpretation failing to recognize this runs the risk of ending up as an unsatisfactory projection of modern ideas into the past. The system of legal proof was based on a hierarchical notion ofproof: even though the boundaries between the different categories of proof may have been poorly demarcated, they nevertheless forced a judge to place his evidentiary findings in arithmetical categories. This is something radically different from the modern categorizations of evidence evaluation. The categorical thinking was not peculiar to the law of proof only, but had been in general deeply embedded in the Western thinking for centuries. The gradual process by which the requirement of full proof and the categorization of evidentiary findings were abrogated during the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century is what the substitution of free evaluation of evidence for the statutory theory of proof was essentially about. concerned, such interpretation runs into serious obstacles. are Conclusion: AWeak Version of the Legal Theory of Proof By the time its decline began around the middle of the nineteenth century, the legal theory of proof had developed certain key elements by which it can conveniently be identified. Incidentally, some of these traits characterize not only the systemof proof but also the contemporary Finnish legal systemas a wLole. First, in its Finnish version, the legal theory of proof was far fromrigid. Much like its ins commune counterpart on the European continent since the late Middie Ages, the Finnish law of proof had developed a rather complex hierarchy of types of judicial decision. Flowever, contrary to the ius commune systemin which extraordinaria had become the system’s principal safety valve designed for cases short of full proof, in the Finnish systempoena extraordinaria, or the corresponding institution of leuteration, was not used to repair the shortcomings of the rigid system of proof. Other techniques were developed to meet the practical needs of crime control, the need to sanction and to disapprove of the behavior of those suspected of serious crimes. This need was met by the intermediate categories of decision: conditional acquittal, absolutio ab instantia, and confessional imprisonment. See Tolonen 1992; Hespanha 1992.
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