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Local Legal Culture and the Control of Litigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Herbert M. Kritzer  and
Frances Kahn Zemans
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Abstract

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In 1983, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were modified to mandate sanctions against attorneys who filed frivolous pleadings or motions or who failed to make reasonable efforts to verify facts or statements of law made in pleadings or motions. There is substantial variation among federal judicial districts in the use of this Rule 11 provision. To what degree can these variations be explained by situational or legal factors? Does one need to use a concept such as local legal culture to account for at least some of the variation? These are the questions addressed by this article. We find that variations in most Rule 11-related activities can be explained by structural and situational factors. We conclude that beyond the expectations created by specific structural and legal factors, one does not need to resort to local legal culture to explain Rule 11-related phenomena. We suggest that the conditions that make local legal culture a useful construct in the context of the criminal courts may not apply in the civil justice system.

Type
Articles on Culture and Compliance
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , 1993 , pp. 535 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This report was originally prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 9–11 April 1992. We would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Lawrence Marshall to the Rule 11 study from which this paper is drawn. This research was conducted under the auspices of the American Judicature Society and was made possible by the generous financial support of the M. R. Bauer Foundation, the West Publishing Company, the Ninth Circuit Attorney Admission Fund, the Illinois Bar Foundation, the Dallas Bar Foundation, the Indiana Bar Foundation, and the Aetna Foundation, Inc.

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