225 forms, legal professionals formed an influential part. For the powerful legal profession, therefore, the extension of bourgeois participation in judicial administration through a jury systemheld absolutely no appeal. There is a close link between law and legal science, on the one hand, and the legal profession as a social group, on the other. At this point, however, the internal questions of legal theory that were aimed at defining the legal professional’s position within legal science — mainly the theories of interpretation and that of legal sources - are set aside and dealt with in the following chapter. Instead, we will consider here the legal professional’s institutional and social position froman extra-scientific point of view. In fact, the two sides of the problemare intimately linked to each other and separated here for expositional convenience only. In this chapter, I propose to make two points. First, I come to the conclusion that the way legal education was reformed in Finland around the middle of the nineteenth century was closely linked to the modernization of the law and the professionalization of the legal corps in general. Together, these phenomena tended to make jurists more conscic')us of the perceived faults of the judicial system; in more ways than one, legal professionals took the lead in latter nineteenth-century Finland. In the domain of criminal procedure, the reformative enthusiasm stripped the law of proof of the rules constraining the judge’s evaluative powers. Second, I claim that the modernization of Finnish society from the 1860s onwards, together with a transformation that occurred among legal professionals as a social group, produced an increase in the legitimation that the judiciary enjoyed among the citizens. This development, then, can be said to have effectively dismissed whatever pressures there may have been to establish trial juries to control professional judges. Furthermore, the pressures to democratize the judiciary were dampened by the already existing lay element in the lower courts (the nämnd system) which served the interests of the wealthy farmers" on the one hand and, on the other, by the fact that the pressures to install a jury systemhad lost momentumin the international discussion by the end of the century. '' Nousiainc'n has referred to the hundred eourts in the eountrvside as the farmers’ own courts. The nämnder in tliose courts were often manned by the wealthiest local farmers. As economic transactions multiplied after the middle of the century, it was the farmers who most often became indebted; therefore, a clear majority of all hundred court cases were cases of payment demands. It is, therefore, understandable that the farmers were not eager to reform the system and create standing courts in the countryside to speed up the procedures. Nousiainen 1993 pp. 487-488, 500-507.
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