Chapter 6 Commercial Law on the Periphery: University Teaching of Commercial Law in Finland, ca. 1780–1846
In: The Development of Commercial Law in Sweden and Finland (Early Modern Period–Nineteenth Century)Search for other papers by Jussi Sallila in
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Abstract
In this chapter I analyze the teaching of commercial law at the Royal Academy of Turku, renamed the Imperial Alexander University after the Russian conquest of Finland 1808–1809 and relocated to Helsinki in 1828. While the characteristic features of the Swedish-Finnish legal tradition were not conducive to the emergence of commercial law as a specific field of law, reforms of the law faculty and its curriculum in the 1810s and 1820s provided an institutional basis that could have served as a foundation for such a discipline. Due to the lack of scholarly publications and textbooks, the main source materials used are the lecture manuscripts written by professors Matthias Calonius (1738–1817) and Johan Jakob Nordström (1801–1974). The lectures reflect two long-term characteristics of Swedish and Finnish law. The flexibility of general private law made it less urgent to develop specifically commercial forms of private law institutions, and there was relatively little need for a separate discipline of commercial law. On the other hand, the analysis of commercial legal institutions often followed the models adopted from foreign commercial law literature. In this fashion, legal expertise developed in the heart of Europe was adopted in the Nordic periphery.