233 reaucracy eroded the traditional estate-based social divisions. In the newsocial order, the higher echelons of society came to consist of civil servants and their internal elites."** However, the creation of a bureaucratic administrative state as such was, of course, a common European phenomenon, not peculiar to Finland. Everywhere, this development led, during the latter half of the century, to a legal positivist state ideology the legitimacy of which was derived froma parliamentary law. Just as the rising absolutism had used Roman law and the legal professional as its tools of power, so did the bureaucratically rational, national state take advantage of the written - later, parliamentary - law and its expert, the legal professional. The position acquired by written law in Finnish legal positivismwas largely because the law’s legitimacy had began to change after the Diet began to convene again after the stateless night in 1863. The laws were nowdrafted by the national legislative body. Anumber of objections to this idea can be made. First, at least formally and in the final instance the laws were seen as emanating from an absolutist emperor. The Russian emperor had to approve of the laws proposed by the Finnish Diet. Second, the three upper estates of with the most power — the nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie - represented only a small minority of the population. But even so, the year 1863 did mark a change, for at least defacto much of the newlegislation nowemanated fromthe national legislation. Fromthe point of viewof legitimation of the law, the parliamentary reformof 1906 and the independence in 1917 can be taken to have meant a further increase. In the liberal Rechtsstaat, toward which steps were taken in latter-nineteenth-century Finland, the active judiciary and Richterrecht derived their legitimacy from the state. In this way, legal positivismis radically different from the ideology of the Historical School, which legitimated the law-creative activity of the jurists by claiming that they were the uppermost interpreters of the customary law emanating originally fromthe Volk. There is another factor that rendered an active judiciary legitimate in the eyes of the citizenry. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a significant change in the social constitution of the legal corps. In the period 1875-78 there were 981 students enrolled at the University; in 1890-93 the number had risen to 1795.'*“ The number of law students rose sharply fromthe 1880s on, and at the beginning of the 1890s the faculty was clearly the University’s largest.'*-^ Whereas the number of students originating from Swedish-language secondary schools was 181 in the period of 1882-1884 and the number of those coming fromthe Finnish-language schools was 74, in the time period of 18881890 the ratio was 207; 166; it took until the last years of the century, however, ■»' Ibid. p. 26. Strömberg 1989 p. 777. « Ibid. p. 796.
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