RB 54

13 central governments had acquired enough strength for the judiciary representing it to legitimately pronounce sentences based only on circumstantial evidence, and it was then that the central power had developed a system professional enough to be controlled efficiently.- The statutory theory of proof was, then, one of the devices with the help of which central power seeks to bind and control a judiciary that it subjugated. A central power seeking to increase its rule can be regarded as one of the central pillars that upheld the legal theory of proof. Although a condicio sine qua non, it was not, however, the only one. For secondly, the legal theory of proof had epistemological prerequisites that cannot wholly be reduced to the political aspect and ought to observed separately. Originally, the legal theory of proof was an application of Aristotelian philosophy to the domain of legal proof. With the emergence of empirist philosophy in the seventeenth century, however, major modifications were made to the theory and its practical applications in the formof poena extraordinaria and the subsequent decline of the use of judicial torture. If empirist philosophy caused important changes in the theory, Kantian philosophy with its concentration on the active and morally responsible subject was to inflict, as far as epistemology is concerned, a fatal blowon the statutory theory of proof. These themes are followed using French and German legal history as comparative examples: France, because it is the first centralized state whose legal development can be followed to the nineteenth century; and Germany, because of the special significance that German legal development has exercised over the Swedish and Finnish development ever since the sixteenth century. The particular shape that the Swedish law of proof acquired in the seventeenth century would be impossible to grasp without awareness of the specific international context of the reception. It was not just any formof legal theory of proof that was adopted by Swedish judicial practice and legislation, but, instead, the theory was adopted in the very formthat it had acquired in the continental jurisprudence at the time of the Swedish reception. Although the uniting thread between continental and Swedish jurisprudence was cut after the promulgation of the Swedish Law of 1734, with which the legal theory of proof became statutory lawin Sweden, in this study eighteenth-century continental jurisprudence is not consistently dealt with, for no decisive changes took place in either the continental or Swedish law of proof until the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.^ Therefore, the thread is only picked up again as the nineteenth-century development is treated. - The connection between the strengthening political power and the law of proof is developed this way in Langbein 1976 pp. 55-56. This is not to say that no changes took place in the European law of proof in most of the eighteenth century; in fact, law of proof is more or less constantly in a state of change. I only wish to claim that the building blocks of the Finnish version of the statutory theory such as it remained in the nineteenth centum- were laid in the seventeenth century and did not suffer essential changes in the eighteenth. by no means

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