238 uation of evidence seems to represent a shift away from legality? Under the principle of legal proof, the taking and evaluating of evidence was regulated in detail by legal norms, so as to leave the judge as little room as possible for his own discretion. The move away fromlegal proof to free evaluation of evidence could be taken to have meant, on the contrary, a certain dejudicialization of the law of proof as the evaluation of proof became a matter of a judge’s or jurymen’s subjective evaluation. With free evaluation, evidence moved froma legally regulated area to a non-regulated sphere. This radical delegalization is clearly demonstrated by the fact that in so many countries, the making of fact decisions was conferred upon laymen instead of legal professionals. At first glance, this shift of evaluation of evidence to an area not regulated by law, dependent on the judge’s moral conviction only, appears, thus, to run counter to the nineteenth-centuryJustizstaat ideology. Yet, the breakthrough of the free evaluation of evidence becomes consistent when viewed against two basic tenets of theJustizstaat, namely legal professionalization and the attempt at increasing the efficacy of the legal system. As estate society came to its end during the course of the century, Finnish legal professionals began to identify themselves in a completely newway institutionally. The professionalization of jurists - in Finland as elsewhere - runs parallel to the breaking down of the Standestaat and the subsequent formation of other professional groups that gradually replaced the old estates. In the modern state, the nature of legal science acquired a new, specific character that was intimately tied to the supreme source of modern law, the statute. Thus, the social position of legal professionals in the modern state is clearly reflected in the novel facets of legal science during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth: it was then that an outright theory of legal sources was first formulated; it was then that the objective theory of interpretation {objektive Auslegungslehre) was substituted for the older subjective theories.^ It was through these theoretical constructions that the position of the legal profession was demarcated in the modern state. Theories of Legal Sources - the Paradox of the Legalist Position Anunderstanding of theories of legal sources, how they came to be formulated and howthey helped define the position of legal professionals in the late nineteenth century is of foremost importance for two reasons. First, as I have stated above, the political and social position of legal professionals was clearly reflected in the position that was assigned to the law created by them, theJuristenrecht. Second and more specifically concerning the legal development in 3 The constitutional control of the administrative body by an independent judiciary is a product of the same epoch. Schroder 1985 pp. 81—85.
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