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Socioeconomic Development and the Evolution of Litigation Rates of Civil Courts in Belgium, 1835–1980

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

F. Van Loon  and
E. Langerwerf
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Abstract

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This article tests the usefulness of some aspects of functional theory in explaining the relationship between socioeconomic development and litigation trends in Belgium for 1835–1980. Some of the six hypotheses derived from functional theory are supported by the data; others are clearly contradicted. The analysis indicates that litigation is obviously not an automatic response to conflict caused by socioeconomic change. Socioeconomic development is only one factor causing litigation, and its explanatory power is limited. Research progress can only be made by studying various kinds of conflict and types of actors, all trying to reach their specific goals in a given social context.

Type
Part II: Pushing Trial Court Docket Data to the Limits—and Beyond
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 24 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Longitudinal Studies of Trial Courts , 1990 , pp. 283 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 The Law and Society Association.

References

1 Appeal is only possible for claims exceeding BFr 15,000 ($400). There are also labor courts that handle individual labor disputes and social security matters (data available only from 1971).

2 All data are given in the Appendix.

3 An alternative approach is to explain the number of cases while controlling for the number of people. But since our research aims to explain the causes of fluctuations over time in the use of courts, measures relative to some base are probably more appropriate. We have chosen to use population as our base in reporting litigation rates.

Unfortunately, the data on civil litigation published by the Belgian National Institute for Statistics only refer to the total number of cases handled by the courts. No data are gathered about the nature of the cases (e.g., contracts, tort, or family) or the parties involved, although at times we can get a rough idea of the kind of cases (e.g., bankruptcy). Population as an expression of the volume of social transactions will thus probably serve as the best available baseline for constructing the litigation rates.

4 Indices of economic development were created from production and population statistics as follows: iron = thousands of tons per 10,000 population; coal = thousands of tons per 1,000 population; electricity = millions of kilowatt-hours per 1,000 population.

5 Because of the effect of the world wars on the activities of courts and the lack of judicial statistical data for the war years, we split the period 1835-1980 into three parts: 1835–1913, 1920–39, and 1946–80.

6 Of course, the connection between the pace of industrial growth and the litigation rate might involve a certain time lag. The effects might be distributed over more than one year or even over several years following the alteration of the underlying social relations. Even if this were systematically the case, it seems to be unlikely that the picture would change dramatically.