the swedish court and appeal system This article could be finished right here – if everything was to remain the same, what else is there to be said? However, not everything actually remained the same, and this makes it interesting to also look at the changes that took place during the Russian period. The truth that the Russian era is in no respect considered a “good old” era in Estonian history writing is exemplified by the fact that the court system and relevant regulations in this period have attracted even less interest in historical research than those of the Swedish times. The following account can therefore only rely on general overviews written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describing the contemporary court system and procedure,39 or on later publications, conducted by the specific legal-political aspirations of codification. The leading figure of the codification attempts of the Baltic provincial law and the main author of nearly all of the drafts to that effect in the 1830s and 1840s was R. J. L. Samson von Himmelstierna. He published a thorough handbook of the Livonian court system and procedure, formulated in the form of articles for a draft of statute.40 This idea of the codification of the law of the Russian Empire, born during the reign of Catherine the Great, rekindled at the time of Alexander I, but ultimately not realised, had its first real results in the form of codes implemented during the rule of Nicholas I. Parallelly, the two first volumes of the Baltic provincial law were also implemented in 1845: Code of Provincial Institutions41 and Estate Law.42 During the conservative, even reactionary rule of Nicholas I, however, the originally modern and reformatory idea of codification had become its opposite. What 39 These, however, were not very many. The Baltic provinces remained for the whole of the following eighteenth century without a university, and the writings of the legal practicioners mostly concerned the general provincial constitution and the privileges of estates, as well as the problems of family and inheritance law. The most notable author is the syndic and magistrate of Tartu, F. K. Gadebusch, whose life and work has been described in a thorough monograph:Kupffer, Christina 2004. It was only in the nineteenth century, that the first overviews of Livonian court system and procedure appeared. A notable work in this context is the practical handbook of the governorate secretary: Nielsen, Christian Heinrich 1806, reprinted in the following year and again, with major additions, in 1825. 40 Samson von Himmelstiern, Reinhold Johann Ludwig 1824. 41 Provinzialrecht I 1845. 42 Provinzialrecht II 1845 228
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=