Prozessrecht und Eid: Recht und Rechtsfindung in antiken Kulturen.

• Author: Christiansen, Birgit

Prozessrecht und Eid: Recht und Rechtsfindung in antiken Kulturen. Teil I. Edited by HEINZ BARTA, MARTIN LANG, and ROBERT ROLLINGER. Philippika, vol. 86.1. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2015. Pp. xiii + 240. [euro]56 (paper).

The book under review contains the contributions of twelve scholars to an interdisciplinary conference on procedural law (Prozessrecht) and oath, which took place in Innsbruck December 14-16, 2011. The volume is the fifth in a series of conference publications that emerged from the Innsbruck conference "Lebend(ig)e Rechtsgeschichte," each of which is devoted to a different legal-historical topic. A second part of the conference on the same topic took place in 2013, the results of which are still unpublished.

The book is divided into four sections, preceded by a foreword by Heinz Barta, greetings by the Dean of the Faculty of Law in Innsbruck, and the conference program. An index of place and personal names completes the volume.

The first section ("Einfuhrung und Grundlagen") consists of a contribution by Heinz Barta ("Verfahrensrecht als fruhes Zivilisierungsprojekt--Zur Teleologie rechtlicher Verfahren, pp. 1-18) and an essay by Kurt Kotrschal ("Biologie oder Moral," pp. 19-39).

Barta outlines the social significance of legal procedures and their central characteristics from a general legal-historical perspective. He emphasizes that legal proceedings are directly linked to state formation and, by suppressing self-help and self-empowerment, make it possible to guarantee legal protection by the state. In order to trace general developments in legal history and to compare the legal procedures of different societies, he names various criteria such as: Who is regarded as the creator and guarantor of law and justice? What is the relationship between legislation and law enforcement? What normative significance do legal procedures have in the respective society? How are the legal procedures organized, who conducts them? Do legal professions exist? In which way are divine instances involved?

Kotrschal's essay traces the evolutionary foundations of moral behavior. The author points out that fundamental morality is rooted in human biology and owed to the necessity of a complex social life based on the division of labor. However, since the brain areas responsible for this can be disturbed by suboptimal social conditions in childhood and vary greatly from one individual to another, each society needs extrinsic control and...