Description:
A comprehensive, three-part study of the sites and procedures of Athenian lawcourts in the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries B.C. Part I discusses various courts, their names and possible sites, and reconstructs their history and daily workings, synthesizing literary, documentary, and physical evidence. Part II discusses the buildings which could have served as courts and the objects found in them. Such court paraphernalia included ballots, receptacles for documents, water clocks (used to time speeches), allotments machines and their accessories (for assigning jurors to the courts), seating tokens, and a curse tablet. Part III collects 355 testimonia on Athenian lawcourts, with Greek text, translation, and commentary.

Reviews:
"This is an important addition to the American School’s series of reports on the excavations in the Athenian Agora and maintains the high standards of scholarship set by its predecessors. Previous volumes have generally dealt with a particular class of physical remains (sculptures, pottery, inscriptions, etc.), a particular period, or a single set of buildings or group of buildings. This one focuses instead on a set of institutions, the lawcourts, which were located at various sites throughout Attica. It is in the Agora that physical remains of the lawcourts are most heavily concentrated, but the identification of these remains is difficult, and requires extensive consideration of the scattered literary evidence. These considerations give the present volume a format and scope that is somewhat different from previous ones."S. C. Todd, AJA 101 (1997), pp. 797-798