235 neither the need nor the means to control its judiciary through requiring that the legal rules of proof be strictly followed. And the jury question? Numerically, the most important lower courts were the hundred courts; in them, lay representation was already arranged, although the lay boards differed in several aspects from the European bourgeois juries. The members of the lay boards in country courts were hand-picked by the judge, and they usually represented the wealthiest layer of the local peasantry. Unlike the actual juries, they were not entitled to decide questions of fact by themselves; they could, instead, decide a case as a totality against the presiding judge’s opinion if they were unanimous. Should one of the laymen dissent, however, it was always the opinion of the presiding judge that prevailed. All in all, it emerges clearly that the bourgeois juries were significantly stronger in comparison with the Finnish-Swedish lay boards. Despite these considerable differences, it is obvious that, compared to Germany or France, the pressures to install a jury systemin Finland were more feeble. First, since community (lay) representation had operated in Finland since the Middle Ages, there was no fertile ground for the kind of criticismthat was directed against a professional judiciary operating in more direct connection to absolute rulers in other parts of Europe. Regarding city courts, no potent liberal movement for the installation of juries existed in the small Finnish towns; besides, many of the court members {rådmen) in towns were laymen as well. Furthermore, as Nousiainen has suggested, the slowly functioning ancient court systemfavored indebted farmers.'*^ Second, until the revival of legal science in the 1850s, there was practically no feasible forum for a debate on the jury; neither were there debaters. And third, when a forumwas finally created in the last two decades of the century, the jury as a radical instrument of political control of the judiciary was already on the decline in other countries; thus, there was no international ideological pressure to install a jury systemin Finland. In short, the prerequisites for effective pressure to establish juries in Finnish criminal trials were lacking because of the already-existing lay representation in the most important lowcourts, the hundred courts; because a feasible platform for such debates was missing; and because the slowness of the court systemwas beneficial to the farmers. Thus, the development of the Finnish law of proof differs in an important aspect fromthat of its continental and, to a certain extent, also Swedish counterparts, as questions of proof were treated separately from the modes of judicial lay representation in Finland. With the emerging capitalism, farmers had increasingly run inter debt. Nousiainen 1993 p. 500.
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