206 and determinine criminal sanctions more effectively than the system of legal proofs. In Finland, unlike most other countries, the change in the law of proof was carried through by the judiciary taking advantage of the relatively dominant position it had acquired in Finnish nineteenth-century society. The breakthrough of free evaluation of evidence fits neatly into the picture of an emerging Weberian rational bureaucracy, for similar tendencies can be observed simultaneously in the other branches of administration. In the 1850s and 1860s the legal professionals could still make radical moves to reform the law through practice, thus by-passing written law, for a modern hierarchization of legal sources had not yet been carried through in Finland; the judiciary had, in that sense, considerably more leeway than it would retain at the end of the 1800s. 14. Crime, Criminal Law, and the Lawof Proof in Nineteenth-Century Finland The law of proof cannot be adequately treated without paying some attention to the substance of criminal law. In this chapter, I shall outline the general tendencies of criminal law in nineteenth-century Finland and place crime, criminal law, and criminalistics in context with the evolution fromthe legal theory of proof to the free theory of evidence. Certain assumptions underlie the wish to locate the lawof proof in this context. First, it may be assumed that changes in the level of criminality would have influenced the law of proof, at least if we see the law of proof as directly affecting the possibilities of crime control that courts have at their disposal. Second, one might feel tempted to identify a relationship of mutual influence between the system of punishments and the law of proof. And third, it is worthwhile to ponder the relation between the ideologies behind criminal law and the lawof proof. In this chapter, I will argue that the changes of the law of proof under consideration in this study cannot be attributed to the undoubtedly radical changes that occurred in the Finnish violent criminality in the late 1700s and the 1800s. It seems plausible, however, that the change which took place in the systemof punishments during the nineteenth century had some effect on the evaluation of proof. However, this bond is not only difficult to establish convincingly, but it can also be answered with forceful counterarguments. All in all, it is highly problematic to explain profound ideological changes of an international scale — to which great changes in the lawof proof undoubtedly belong - by changes in individual national statutes. Therefore, connecting the development of evidentiary theories to that of the prevalent ideologies of criminal law seems more fruitful. I will, then, advance
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