258 tion: especially the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises (for example, Nehrman) tended to be simple and manual-like, and could be used by non-jurists. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the lack of legal literature is especially clearly seen. As one observes the paragraphs of the PS of 1734, one notices that the legislator took the lay character of the law into consideration as well: in order for the lawto be used by courts manned by laymen, the theory of proof in the statute is cleansed of excess technicalities requiring legal education. In the Finland of the 1850s, then, the lack of a legal science, together with the impossibility of changing the law through statutory measures, was evident. Practically no treatise writer appeared to take a stand for or against any theory of proof; because of the “stateless night” no statutes could be enacted. Furthermore, although Finland was otherwise firmly governed by the Senate, the same cannot be said of the way its judicial department directed the course of the law. Finland’s was a judicial hierarchy without strict leadership, thus allowing the higher courts and the lower courts relatively great freedom, at least insofar as matters of proof were concerned. When the legal profession as an entitv of its own emerged into the legal vacuumof the middle of the 1800s, it is logical that the pressures to modernize the law of proof were channeled through the courts. As the abolition of legal rules of proof considerably broadened the scope of action reserved for the courts, it is obvious that a positive attitude towards the free evaluation of evidence must have seemed tempting to the judiciary. Therefore, it is understandable that the Finnish judiciary should not have been keen on initiating a discussion on the necessity of broadening lay participation through juries. Internationally, the pressures to install a jury systemwere, moreover, fading away as the social composition of the judiciary neared that of the middle classes in the later 1800s. The Enlightenment idea behind the jurv - that of acting as a control on professional judges - was no longer there. In Finland, no politically powerful bourgeoisie ever arose to demand a jury system, nor did the virtual summit of political power, the Senate consisting largely of jurists, have any need to hold on to the statutory rules of proof as a limitation to the range of the judiciary’s freedom in the lower courts and the high courts. The abolition of legal rules of proof was, then, a product of an active judiciary. Only some decades later were the results of this active reform of the Finnish law of proof to be incorporated theoretically into the science of procedural law, and it took almost a whole century before the free evaluation of evidence was given statutory formin 1948. Some important observations still remain to be made, and they refer to the questions of power and legitimacy, or the relations of the judiciary to the ruler and the ruled. Above, we have seen how the important transformations in the lawof proof, to secure their workability, have always had to be related to their acceptance in the community ruled by them. In the Middle Ages, the emerging
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