59 the ideological change to group interests conveys only part of the truth. For her, the fact that the turning to natural lawproduced little change on the level of positive statutory law does not imply a minor impact of natural law. Instead, the shift to natural law meant that Roman law, which before the 1680s had served as the principal conceptual apparatus with the help of which statutory material had been organized in jurisprudence, was now restored to the level of a particular, national legal order. Roman law lost its universal validity and became “the law of the Romans,” nothing else, whereas all statutory law, in order to be considered acceptable and valid, nowhad to pass the test of natural law. Therefore, statutes and legal practices with their origin in the “Romano-German” period could also logically continue to be upheld after the 1680s, and no complete revision of the legal material was necessary.^ Viewed against Paasto’s presentation, the inclusion of the statutory theory of proof in the Law of 1734 becomes understandable. The statutory theory of proof, although definitely part of “Roman law,” passed the test of natural law; the rules seemed acceptable tc) the drafters of the Law of 1734 and to the contemporary natural law thinkers, such as Nehrman. Yet the law of proof did not remain completely untouched by natural law thinkers, as we have seen above. The breakthrough of probability as an epistemological concept in the early Modern Age is not only seen in the field of philosophy proper, but it is also reflected in the writings of natural lawthinkers, specialists in criminal procedure, and in judicial practice as well. Natural law thus did not abandon Roman-canon law of proof, although it modified it considerably. As I will show, it was this modified form of Roman-canon law of proof that was adopted in seventeenth-century Sweden. Since this formof the statutory lawof proof was in itself considerably affected by natural law, it is no wonder that the statutory theory of proof could be carried over fromthe 1680s and to the Law of 1734. These theoretical changes are not reflected much in the way the statutory theory of proof was adopted into the Lawof 1734. Paradoxically, as if none of the epistemological changes had taken place, the Swedish Lawof 1734 seems to depart from a rather uncompromising idea of the statutory theory of proof: the rigid rules apply to all kinds of cases, civil and criminal alike. The paradox is comprehensible against the general background of premodern law, however, for it shows the varying interests and aspirations of different levels of law at work. It was in the interest of the centralized power to attempt to bind the judiciary by a set of strict, uncompromising rules, as if natural law and rational empirismhad afflicted no change on the medieval lawof proof. By those rules, the control of the evidentiary evaluation was sought to be transferred to the royal high courts; such a control would have been unthinkable in a system Paasto 1994 pp. 213-216. Foriers 1965 pp. 169-171.
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