The strict relationship between Law and Religion in the Roman civilization was always an obvious observation of the historiography (see the basic book of Wissowa about Roman Religion). The reinterpretation of Roman Law and Religion is now a very fertile topic of the current historiography of Roman Religion.
The last work of this kind is a collective volume appeared as the 336.th volume of the Brill series "History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity". The book "Law and Religion in the Roman Republic" edited by Olga Tellegen - Couperus (223.p.) is the first monograph of this kind in the last years, concentrating on the aspects of Law and Religion in the Roman Republic. After a short introduction by the editor, the book has three parts:
I. Law and Religion as means to control the future (2 articles by Leon ter Beek and Federico Santangelo)
II. Priests, magistrates and the state (4 articles by Michel Humm, Jörg Rüpke, Jan Hendrik Valgaeren and Linda Zollschan)
III. Sacred law, civil law and the citizen (Olga Tellegen - Couperus)
A short description of the book: "Over the past two hundred plus years, scholarship has admired Roman law for being the first autonomous legal science in history. This biased view has obscured the fact that, traditionally, law was closely connected to religion and remained so well into the Empire. Building on a variety of sources – epigraphic, legal, literary, and numismatic – this book discloses how law and religion shared the same patrons (magistrates and priests) and a common goal (to deal with life’s uncertainties), and how, from the third century B.C., they underwent a process of rationalization. Today, Roman law and religion deserve our admiration because together they supported and consolidated the growing power of Rome (loc.cit.)
Clifford - Rüpke: Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome, 2006
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