Summing up the findings of this comparative research, one can conclude that the model of the Swedish court of appeal as it was created in Stockholm and the Svea Court of Appeal was duplicated in other parts of the realm, Livonian Dorpat included. The statutes regulating the Dorpat Court of Appeal were similar to those governing the Svea Court of Appeal, albeit with some differences. The most important of these differences was that the Livonian courts, the Dorpat Court of Appeal included, were to follow different legal sources than the courts in Sweden proper. In Livonia, the local law was accepted as one of the sources. The differences in practice were more significant than those in the statutes. The Livonian court proved less of a court of appeal than the Svea Court of Appeal. In Livonia, the access of peasants to the Court of Appeal was effectively barred because their cases were rarely heard even in the lower courts but in the manorial court, which survived. The judicial culture of Livonia was considerably more in the hands of learned lawyers, who dominated the civil procedure and the accusatorial criminal procedure, in comparison to Sweden proper. The procedure in both of these was written and proceeded with lawyers’ briefs. Although learned discussions took place in at the Svea Court as well, in Dorpat the learned judicial culture was taken further. In criminal procedure, clearly the biggest difference was that judicial torture was living law in Livonia until the 1680s, with the Court of Appeal giving formal permission for the lower courts to torture. In Sweden, torture was making its way in the early seventeenth century, but was never accepted as legal and was successfully rooted out. The European court of appeal was a phenomenon that came in many shapes and sizes. The same idea was transferred from one realm to another, and the same basic structure was multiplied within the realms. The products of legal transfer, the courts in action, could be different however. This often happened on purpose, as the idea of a court of appeal sometimes needed tailoring to suit particular local circumstances. Sometimes the product took a different shape unexpectedly, because the local circumstances simply made it different. This could even happen within one and the same realm, as I have set out to show in this article. the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 256 Conclusion
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