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Defendants and one-Shotters Win After All: Compliance with Court Decisions in Civil Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Peter J. Van Koppen  and
Marijke Malsch
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Abstract

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Repeat players and plaintiffs seem to have an advantage in the negotiation phase and in the trial phase of civil disputes. We suggest that their advantage may turn to a disadvantage after the court's judgment, when the award has to be collected. We contacted attorneys for all cases in three trial courts in The Netherlands in which the plaintiff's claim had been granted in whole or in part in a final decision three years earlier (N=970). We asked them to what extent the defendant complied with the judgment. The results show that plaintiffs have difficulty in collecting their awards. On average, only a little more than half the award is collected after three years. Repeat players continue to prevail if they are plaintiffs, but are worse off than one-shotters if they are defendants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , 1991 , pp. 803 - 820
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

We would like to thank the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, especially Petrus C. van Duyne and Els Barends, for supplying us with the basic data on the cases. Christopher Oddie, Shari Diamond, and three anonymous reviewers gave useful comments on an earlier draft. This study was supported with the generous hospitality to Peter van Koppen from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) at Wassenaar, The Netherlands. Correspondence should be sent to Peter van Koppen at Erasmus University, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

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