the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 230 Secondly, the reception meant adopting a certain professional legal technique, which cannot be reduced to clear-cut rules with a substantive normative content. Thus, learned lawyers all over continental Europe had a more or less common understanding of how rules were to be interpreted (extensively or restrictedly), how conflicts between legal sources were resolved and under what conditions customary law was valid. Legal culture is notoriously difficult to determine, and an exact definition will not be attempted here either. When I speak of legal culture, I refer to what Lawrence Friedman calls “internal legal culture,” the ideas and practices of legal professionals.619 We could also speak of judicial culture. Learned lawyers not only use different normative sources and techniques of legal reasoning, but lawyers also behave differently in court. They have their own manner of speaking and writing, which is one of first things one notices in acquainting oneself with the archives of any learned seventeenth-century court. Lawyers tend to argue systematically, often numbering their arguments, and they use Latin terminology even when it is not needed for the sake of their argument strictly speaking. Nation states have almost self-evidently often been taken as natural entities of legal cultures. However, as David Nelken has argued, even smaller or larger units may have distinct cultures of their own. A court of appeal may serve as an example of a unit smaller than a nation state and Europe as example of a larger unit.620 No doubt, different parts of early modern composite states, such as seventeenth-century Sweden, maywell serve as entities of legal cultural comparison. Legal culture, the way I have defined it, cannot always be separated from procedural law. Some of the features of internal or judicial legal culture are simultaneously features of customary procedural law. This will be shown below, when different modes of procedure andleuterationare discussed. Let us now see how the courts of Svea and Dorpat differed as to their legal culture as defined above. Since not all aspects can be systematically dealt with in this short piece, I have chosen to approach the subject from as close to the sources as I can, from the everyday legal practice of the two courts. I will start with the Dorpat court. The procedure at the Dorpat Court of Appeal can best be described as oral and written at the same time. A typical day at the Court consisted of 619 Friedman, Lawrence M. 1985 pp. 33-40. 620 Nelken, David 2004 pp. 3-4.
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