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Studying Courts in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

David M. Trubek
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Civil courts and litigation, long a neglected area of legal scholarship (Hurst, 1981), have begun to receive more attention and due recognition of their important role in the legal system and society. Analyses of what the civil courts do, and fail to do, are taking their place beside the numerous studies of the criminal courts. A critical literature has emerged, with some arguing that our system provides no effective forum for many civil complaints (Nader, 1980) and others expressing concern that the adversarial mode of dispute processing—the hallmark of Anglo-American civil procedure—may be costly and inappropriate for many conflicts (Fuller, 1978; Horowitz, 1977; Simon, 1978). Critics have also pointed to rising litigation rates and court caseloads, generated spectres of a “litigation explosion” or “crisis in the courts,” and worried about excessive litigiousness (Barton, 1975; Manning, 1977; Rosenberg, 1972).

Type
Part Two-The Civil Litigation Research Project: A Dispute-Focused Approach
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 15 , Issue 3-4: Special Issue on Dispute Processing and Civil Litigation , 1981 , pp. 485 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association.

References

1 CLRP was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice under Contract No. J01A-79-C-0040, with supplemental funding from the University of Wisconsin Law and Graduate Schools. The principal investigators are: David Trubek (Wisconsin), William Felstiner (USC), Joel Grossman (Wisconsin), Herbert Kritzer (Wisconsin), and Austin Sarat (Amherst). Richard Miller (Wisconsin) served as project manager. Richard Abel (UCLA), Earl Johnson (USC), and Neil Komesar (Wisconsin) participated in the conceptual phase of the Project. We received helpful advice from Marc Galanter (Wisconsin), Richard Lempert (Michigan), and Stewart Macaulay (Wisconsin). Survey work was done by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Terence Dungworth of Public Sector Research, Inc. helped in the analysis of institutional costs.

2 Field work ended in the Fall of 1980. A first report, analyzing some of the data collected, will be submitted to the Department of Justice by the end of 1981.

3 This project involves a series of teams from various countries who are all studying aspects of the treatment (processing) of disputes in their respective countries. For details, see Blegvad (1979).

4 Disagreements can be found in this issue itself. Compare, for example, the definition of “dispute” used by CLRP (Miller and Sarat, 1981: 526) with those proposed by Lempert (1981: 708) and Yngvesson and Mather (1981: 776).

5 Bell saw the goals of legal reform as: “to assure access to effective justice for all citizens. . . (3) to reduce impediments to justice unnecessarily resulting from separation of powers and federalism, and (4) to increase and improve research in the administration of justice” (1978: 53). For a discussion of the OIAJ program, see Sarat (1981).

6 The Pound Conference held in 1976 to explore “The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice” signaled a conscious effort to initiate a new era in reform thinking. Setting the tone for the Conference, Chief Justice Warren Burger stressed the need to develop “new machinery for resolving disputes” and for systematic planning for civil justice (Burger, 1976). Other speakers followed the Chief Justice's lead. For example, Professor Frank Sander noted that, “we are increasingly making greater and greater demands on the courts to resolve disputes that used to be handled by other institutions of society.” Noting that the courts alone could not respond to such accelerating demands, he concluded that it had become “essential ... to examine other alternatives” (Sander, 1976: 114).

7 A catalogue of most of the major research on courts was prepared for CLRP. See Schroeder (1980).

For references cited in this article, see p. 883.