234 for the number of Finnish-speaking law students to exceed the Swedish-speaking ones/"^ Gradually, just as in France and Germany, the legal profession came to reflect the population’s social composition better than before. What does this all mean as far as changes in the lawof proof are concerned? The connection between theories of proof and state (judicial) power is evident. As stated many times above, the legal theory of proof in its different historical forms has served as one of the tools of the centralizing power to control the decision-making of its judges. The history of the legal theory of proof such as it appears in the nascent centralizing government of the late Middle Ages or in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sweden goes to prove this, and so does the way the theory was upheld in the absolutist European states until the hourgeois revolutions. I have attempted to show that a common feature for situations in which legal rules of proof are abandoned is that the judiciary and the power elite become more alike as social groups. Pre-revolutionary France and post-1848 Germany, with their bourgeoisie political elites on one hand, and on the other, bourgeoisie juries deciding questions of guilt free of legal rules of proof, offer an example. In both cases, the power elite’s need to control those deciding evidentiary questions had disappeared as the groups became one and legal professionals had largely assimilated into the middle strata of society (see Chapter 7-8). The development in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland of the 1800s does not deviate essentially from the pattern. Until the end of the Swedish domination, the judiciary in Finland (and in Sweden) operated under an absolutist rule. As we have seen, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer a plentiful variety of examples of how the Crown attempted to control its courts; control through the rules of proof was only one of the means. Although the absolutist reign continued in principle without pause all through the autonomy,‘^5 legal profession altered radically after Finland had been annexed to Russia. It can well be stated that after the virtual dissolution of the estate society, Ständestaat, after the middle of the century, the newly emerged legal profession became by far the most important professional group wuthin Finland’s power elite, the Senate and the Diet. The judiciary was part of a powerful legal elite that virtually ran the Grand Duchy. Moreover, the judicial hierarchy was poorly developed in the sense that higher instances were able to exercise littleactive control on the lower ones concerning theoretical questions of proof. The legal corps that at the top of the autonomous Grand Duchy had Ibid. pp. 796-797. The number of law students declined sharply at the turn of the century, however. It has been suspected that the decrease occurred because the possibilities of removing a civil servant fromoffice were facilitated; moreover, government careers had been opened to legal professionals originating from the Russian universities. All this probably made a government career less attractive. Ibid. p. 797. On the relativity on the term“absolutism,” see Tiihonen 1994 (a) pp. 160-163.
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