the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 412 crimes against the king or his councillors.1172 The rather harsh practice in those cases (with severe corporal punishment combined with life-time penal servitude as the normal sanction) is interesting from a procedural perspective. As Nilsén points out, the Courts of Appeal in practice developed a review of the capital punishment cases from the lower courts, known as leuteration. In many cases they commuted the sentence to lifetime imprisonment. This more or less standard review of the severe criminal cases was made in the crimen læsæ maiestatis cases in the first instance. An interesting outcome discussed inNilsén’s informative article is that the Court of Appeal justices in their position as a forum privilegiatumrecommended milder sentences than prescribed in the medieval legislation. And the king often accepted their decisions. In other words, in practice they applied the King’s personal right to pardon the convicted and served as a permanent delegated king’s court. Two articles in the book deal with the Court of Appeal as a forum privilegiatumfor the nobility. Anu Lahtinen’s article deals with inheritance cases with noble families as parties from the early years of the Court. Since these legal conflicts started in the 1550s and ’60s, long before the foundation of the Court of Appeal, Lahtinen offers a very interestinglongue durée study of the transformation of the legal culture in these Finnish cases, metaphorically similar to the individual lawbook mentioned from the early seventeenth century intertwining old manuscripts with printed laws. The extended conflicts demonstrated not only a wide range of arguments from the parties, but Lahtinen also demonstrates the lively narratives of the legal disputes culminating in the sessions in the courtroom in the Stockholm royal castle as an arena for conflict resolution within the nobility. In the cases regarding inheritance, Lahtinen emphasizes the latent keywords of status andhonour for the noblemen in their irritated comments in their briefs. It helps us to understand, Lahtinen claims, “why the nobility wanted to have its disputes judged by peers only: the details of these disputes were not something they wanted to be leaked out to the commoners.”1173 The independent position of the Court of Appeal has been underlined in the characterization of the Court’s relation to the King. Royal dona1172 See Per Nilsén’s article in this volume, p. 204. 1173 See Anu Lahtinen’s article in this volume, p. 157.
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