236 Conclusion In this chapter, the juridic-professional and institutional prerequisites for the evidentiary transformation of the Finnish nineteenth-century lawof proof are examined. Before legal modernization, the Finnish legal professionals, although an influential social group ever since the beginning of the period of autonomy, were not yet organized as a profession. The professionalization and the need to organize the growing masses of legislational material scientifically, both products of the modernization of Finnish society from the mid-nineteenth-century onwards, led to a growing concern about legal problems. Therefore, and because legislative reforms in the field were not successful, the pressing need to transformthe lawof proof was realized through court practice. Above, I have attempted to show that questions of proof have a relation to questions of power and legitimacy. On one hand, the lawof proof must be legitimate- accepted or tolerated—fromthe point of viewof the subjects of legal order; on the other hand, the theory of proof in use must comply with the existing social power structure. Fromthis point of view, Finland went through great transformations during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the estate-based social order gradually became replaced by other social divisions and wider social strata were included in the political decision-making. For this reason, legal professionals can be assumed to have gained wider legitimacy, necessary in order to rid the profession of the legal rules straining its decision-making. Furthermore, as legal professionals themselves had come to form the professional nucleus of the power elite, the need to control the judiciary’s activities through rules of proof - a control “from the above” -, typical of premodern states, lost its foundation. In Finland, the substitution of the free evaluation of evidence for legal rules of proof did not occur together with a jury debate as in many other countries. Owing to the lack of scientific procedural law (until the 1890s) and to virtual absence of scientific legal discussions in general (until the 1860s), there was no proper forum where this kind of debate could have taken place. In addition, as lay representation had already been organized for centuries through the nämnd system, no pressure to install a jury system arose despite the growing liberalist political tendencies in the second half of the 1800s. At this time, the major ideological pressure fromabroad had also lessened considerably, as the institution was on the decline in other countries. The status of the legal profession as a professional institution and its relation to the transformation of the law of proof are, thus, seen to be connected to the modernization of the law. In the next chapter, the focus is shifted specifically to that phenomenon. In what relation did legal modernization and the law of proof stand to each other in nineteenth-century Finland?
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