the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 20 the estates owned by the nobility and resulted in a struggle for the remaining resources. Such findings would indicate that all the Swedish courts of appeal had differents profiles. However, much more research would need to be done in this area. The essay by Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen tells a story about the professionalization of appeal court judges in early modern Sweden up to 1809 in terms of increased university education first abroad and then in Sweden and more specifically judicial career paths. Her research also highlights the uses of comparative approaches in legal history. She has conducted longue durée research into the educational background of the judges of the Svea Court of Appeal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In her comparative analysis juxtaposing the education and careers of the Turku Court of Appeal judges and those of the Svea Court, Vasara-Aaltonen has observed that the early seventeenth-century Turku Court had more educated judges than the Svea Court. In the last of the research articles of this volume, Martin Sunnqvist also employs the comparative method in analysing the seal of the Svea Court of Appeal in the context of royal jurisdictional powers in Sweden and certain other European countries. Sunnqvist acknowledges the iconographical debt of the Svea Court to its predecessor, King Erik XIV’s High Council in the 1560s, but argues that the differences indicate the independence of the Svea Court in relation to the ruler. The present seal in its 1818 form stresses the equality of every man in the eyes of the law. The balanced scales acted as harbingers of dawning legal modernity, a world in which the estates and their privileges no longer existed and all citizens were equal before the law. As Elsa Trolle Önnerfors pointed out in her article, the dismantling of the privileges of the Swedish nobility was a long process that finally came to an end in the twenty-first century despite the forum privileges of the estate being abolished in 1865 and 1916. Instead of declaring the earlier history of the Svea Court exhausted after this book, we rather invite more legal historian and historians to conduct research into its extensive records. Our perspectives represent just a few approaches and research questions out of a vast array of opportunities. Even for many of the contributors, these essays are rather a beginning than an end to Svea Court of Appeal research. Through this vänbok, liber amicorum, and the research it presents, I and all the other contributors wish to pay our homage to the Svea Court of Appeal in celebrating its fourth
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