Sachverhaltsarbeit als Steuerungsinstrument im Zivilprozeß

Prof. Dr. Oskar Hartwieg (1936-2001) studierte Rechtswissenschaften in München und Hamburg, war Wissenschaftlicher Assistent bei Josef Esser in Tübingen und lehrte seit 1976 als Professor für Zivilprozessrecht und Internationales Wirtschaftsrecht an der Juristischen Fakultät der Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Prof. Dr. Stephan Meder lehrt seit 1998 Zivilrecht und Rechtsgeschichte an der Juristischen Fakultät der Universität Hannover.

The relation between cases and norms is a fundamental question in modern jurisprudence. Oskar Hartwieg understands cases and norms as variables that cannot simply be taken separately and made to match in legal decision-making processes. He is primarily interested in establishing how the judges' evaluations of case facts can be captured theoretically. He is thereby critical of the predominant "normative standpoint", which pronounces the will of the legislature to be the general benchmark. Hartwieg has no doubt at all that the work of the legal practitioners relates primarily to legal texts, either as individual, more or less abstractly formulated pieces of legislation or in interaction with other norms. But jurisprudence is more than just a text-bound science. This is evident alone from the term "circumstances of the case", which concedes to each case its own properties and in this way expresses a curious distance between language and things. It is this distance on which Hartwieg's research focuses, and which once more plays an important role in current theoretical legal debate.