Introduction

In nineteenth-century Finland, there was a growing notion that common people and the poor sorely needed access to legal aid and advice.^[547] While professional lawyers, who had graduated from the Helsinki Faculty of Law,

¹This research has been conducted as part of the project “Legal Literacy in Finland ca.

tended to work in central positions in the town judiciary and were also available for advocacy, their fees were too high for the lower echelons of the society. As Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen discusses in this book, some towns appointed advocates for the poor and committees on the poor and workers’ conditions. These started to provide legal aid to the lower classes in the late nineteenth century.² Although smaller and peripheral rural municipalities had few, if any, trained lawyers, they had a range of legal literates providing legal advice and services, including acting as lay advocates.³

Legal questions and answers (Q&A) columns were one such form of advice-seeking and -giving. Advice-giving has been described as a norma­tive activity in which one (or several) person(s) “describes, recommends, or otherwise forwards a preferred course of future action.”⁴ Naturally, the type of interaction is different, for example, whether it is solicited or unre­quested, or whether it takes place in a face-to-face discussion between professionals and clients, impersonally on the pages of a newspaper, or—as nowadays—online on the internet.

This chapter will demonstrate how the Q&A columns in Finnish- language newspapers came to provide legal advice and increase the legal literacy of their readers beginning in the 1890s. There is little research on legal advice in newspapers in general in Finland although its relevance as legal aid has been acknowledged.⁶ Thus, I will first sketch how regularly of Legal Aid in the Premodern and Modern World,” 18-19 March 2019, arranged at the Faculty of Law of the University of Turku (Finland), for the feedback and discussions.

² See, for example, Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen’s chapter in this book; Aura, 7 Sept. 1893, pp. ^1-2.

³ For example, Pihlajamaki (2011), pp. 387-394.

⁴Heritage and Sefi (1992), p. 368. For legal Q&A columns as legal aid, for example, Nousiainen (1980); Vasara-Aaltonen (2020).

⁵ Leppanen (1998), p. 209.

⁶ For the rest of the world, see, for example, Bradley (2014), pp. 888-911; Black (2013); Michelson (2008), pp. 43-71. For Finland, Nousiainen (1980), esp. pp. 1, 73-129—on the history of legal Q&A columns, pp. 75-80; Landqvist (2010), p. 51. appearing legal advice columns in the Q&A format appeared in Finnish newspapers in the 1890s, focusing on what is known as the “conventional problem-page genre.” This involves “an advice-seeker describing a prob­lem and asking for advice in the form of a letter” while an expert answers questions advising the inquirer.^[548]

I further explore which newspapers and periodicals published such col­umns in the 1890s and 1900s. Then, I analyse the types of questions com­monly asked in these columns and the fields of law before turning to the actors and their motivation: newspapers, the inquirers, and the experts responding to the questions. I also assess the relevance of legal advice col­umns for providing legal aid and increasing legal literacy in late nineteenth­century and early twentieth-century Finland.