9 then extended to cover all civil and criminal cases.These statutory reforms, however, only followed the changes that had occurred at the level of legal practice decades earlier.'^ Before entering the actual theme of the study, a fewwords on the situation of nineteenth-century Finland, and the country’s administrative and judicial apparatus of the time are in order.After its separation from Sweden, Finland was annexed to the Russian Empire as an autonomous Grand Duchy. The Russian Emperor governed Finland as Grand Duke. The autonomy meant that “the country”-^ was governed by its own administrative organs - the most important of which were the Senate the Diet, and the Governor General as representative of the Emperor. As the Diet was not convened by the Emperor at all during the “stateless night” of 1809-1863, the factual power resided largely with the Senate and the senators. The Senate acted in the name of the czar, and prepared, among other things, draft decrees and law proposals for himto decide.-- The essence of Finland’s autonomy rested on the strong Senate: Finland’s autonomy w'as, in fact, the bureaucracy’s and Senate’s autonomy.-^ It was only after 1863 that the Diet developed to rival the Senate’s position as Finland’s power center. During all of the nineteenth century, the administrative language remained Swedish; the language of the majority, Finnish, had no official position until the 1880s.-‘* Promoting Finland “to a nation among nations” in the annexation, emperor Alexander I agreed to uphold Finland’s constitutions and the rest of the legal The struggle for a total reform since the late nineteenth century, including the legislative travauxpréparatoircs, is given an exhaustive treatment in Nousiainen 1993 pp. 534-569. In its statement on the government proposal no. 39/1933, the Supreme Court expressly dedares that “our legal practice has for a long time relied on free evaluation of evidence.” Hallitukscn csitys N:o 39/1933. It is significant, however, that not even the travauxpréparatoircs of the earlier statutes contain any genuine discussion on the principles of evidence evaluation. See the following proposals to the Estates and to the Parliament: csitys N:o 14/1897 (Railroad Compensation Act), csitys N:o 19/1897 (Custody Act), and hallitukscn csitys N:o 45/1917. The best general introductions to the theme are K. W. Rauhala’s “Suomcn Keskushallinnon järjestämisestä vuosina 1808-1817 I-H” (Helsinki, 1910) and “Keisarillincn Suomen Senaatti 1809-1909 I-II” (Helsinki, 1915, 1921), and Markku Tyynila’s “Senaatti, tutkimus hallituskonsclji-senaatista” (Helsinki, 1992). When referring to Finland of those times, the terms “country” of “state” arc ambivalent, since a national icfcntity was only starting to be formed in the second half of the nineteenth centurv. Under Sweden, Finland was always considered a province. The “invention” of the Finnish state in the 1860s is the central argument of Jussila (1987). So at least until the convocation of the Diet in 1863, after which the Senate began acting as an “upper chamber” between the Diet and the Emperor. Tc'vnila 1992 p. 380-381. -- Tvvnila 1991 pp. 138-139. Ylikangas 1986 pp. 105-106. From 1884 onwards parties could ask for court records in Swedish or in Finnish, and in 1886 other government organs were allowed to use Finnish in their official internal communication.
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