marju luts-sootak In 1796, he ordered the university to be reopened in Tartu, where it had been located already in the Swedish era. The Landesuniversität of the Baltic provinces indeed opened its doors in 1802 as the only Germanlanguage university in the Russian Empire, as well as the only one that included a separate faculty of law.63 Until the university reform of 1835, the other Russian universities only contained a general ethical-political faculty.64 Although the University of Tartu, educating a growing number of lawyers, and the faculty of law stood up, above all in 1820s, for the idea that just as during the “good old Swedish times”, university education would be required from judges in the Baltic provinces, such appointments nevertheless remained the privilege of immatriculated nobles.65 As mentioned before, the highest point of the kingthood’s influence over the court system came even later – this was in 1845 when Tsar Nicholas I approved the two first volumes of the provincial law code. According to these, the offices of judges and assessors were only reserved to the members of the knighthood, who were in turn also elected by knighthood members. In Estonia, the knighthood even had the right of final decision by the election of court members, while in Livonia, it had the right to present candidates, whereas the final choice was made by the imperial governor. Therefore, there were important changes in the social, or more accurately, the estate background of the Livonian judges, confirmed once more in the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike in contemporary Europe, it was not the bourgeois or learned assessors who were rising to the positions earlier occupied by nobles. On the contrary: the nobility, or, rather, the privileged part of it, took over even those places that already the Swedish-era court system had reserved to commoners. One of the most important changes in the nineteenth century Baltic court system came as a result of the freeing of serfs, which also meant the 63 About the tasks of the Tartu faculty of law in the first half of the nineteenth century, see: Luts, Marju 2000passim. 64 Silnizki, Michael 1997 pp. 187-404. 65 For a more thorough account, see: Luts, Marju 2004 pp. 274-297. 235
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