This essay traces the rise of longitudinal studies of courts. In the United States, the rise of a sociolegal school of history (the “Wisconsin school”) was the immediate stimulus. Longitudinal studies, in Europe and the United States, explored the relationship between law and the economy; they tended to find an inverse relationship. But more recent findings suggest some reversal of this trend. Changes in the nature of business relationships have stimulated increases in some forms of major business litigation. Moreover, in modern legal culture, freedom is conceived of in substantive terms; and the courts appear more and more to be the place where true justice can be found.

This article argues that some of the weaknesses in the longitudinal study of courts derive from an excessively macro-law focus on legal processes relatively uninformed by micro-law processes. Greater attention to the micro-macro relationship offers new opportunities for longitudinal studies themselves and for the integration of their findings into the mainstream of law and social science.

The article presents preliminary findings of a caseload study which covers preindustrial and industrial periods of judicial activity in Bremen, Germany. It discusses the historical comparability of the data and opposes evolutionary approaches in longitudinal research. Waves and exponential trends are examined as stable elements in the time series. Five historical periods of different growth patterns are distinguished. Higher litigation rates of previous times lead to the conclusion that modern society handles far more potential legal conflict with relatively less litigation than did society in earlier periods.

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.

Using data from trial courts in four Illinois counties for the period 1870 to 1960, this article explores the utility of a model for explaining patterns and changes in caseload dynamics. The model sees patterns and changes in caseload dynamics as the result of three sets of factors: long-term local environmental trends; short-term fluctuations in local environmental conditions; and institutional contraints. It assumes that change is essentially a nonlinear and contingent process, these characteristics of change being the consequences of the sensitivity of caseload dynamics to the initial environmental conditions of a locale and the infrequent and varied socioeconomic transitions that different locales experience. Such transitions, the article argues, are the key to identifying the underlying similarities beneath the apparent diversity in caseload dynamics among different sites.

This article uses a study of a public housing eviction board over a thirty-year period to illustrate the ambiguities and difficulties that attend longitudinal court docket research. It argues that these problems can never be eliminated but that they may be minimized by strategies that complement quantitative court docket data with qualitative contextual information. Several such strategies are mentioned.

One of the problems facing researchers who have studied courts across time and space has been the cultural variability of seemingly uniform analytic categories, including conceptions of time and space themselves. This article proposes that we take such variations in meaning as a starting point for comparative studies of courts and social change rather than viewing them as were “noise” in the system. Litigation in Chiangmai, Thailand, is presented as an example. Changing conceptions of “space” in Thailand from the nineteenth century to the present illustrate the transformation of legal and political authority as well as the proliferation of normative systems and dispute processing fora. By focusing analysis on variations in the meaning of a concept such as “space,” it is possible to discern the significance of litigation in relation to unofficial systems of normative ordering and to gain insight into changing relationships among individuals, local communities, patron-client hierarchies, and the state.

Longitudinal trial court studies lack a simple model of system litigation. This essay advances the argument that models which attempt to explain either trial court behavior or changes in civil litigation have little explanatory power. Rather, a system mobilization model is needed that has the following paradigms: (1) a perception paradigm that produces awareness of matters that might be the subject of a conflict or dispute; (2) a paradigm that explains how these detected matters are socially constructed as potentially legal matters; (3) a legal mobilization paradigm explaining how legal agents or some legal subsystem is mobilized to handle some legal matters; (4) a process paradigm explaining how matters that enter the trial courts become matters for trial; (5) a trial court mobilization paradigm followed by (6) an appellate process paradigm. The development of such a model of system litigation will resolve some of the methodological as well as conceptual problems that currently beset research on trial courts. A number of these problems relating to the longitudinal study of trial courts are discussed.

This article suggests ways to integrate the insights and findings of two rather distinct fields: docket-based, longitudinal studies of trial courts and studies of dispute processing. In particular, I argue that longitudinal research on courts would benefit enormously from the incorporation of concepts and data on dispute processing. For example, instead of taking court cases as the starting point for study, longitudinal research should explore the multistage and transformative nature of disputing. Historical data should also be collected on the nature of the relationships between opposing litigants, on the roles played by participants other than the litigants (lawyers, supporters, audiences, third parties), and on the nature of processes within courts and within alternative community institutions for handling disputes. Longitudinal research can also contribute to our understanding of dispute processing by showing how current processes have been shaped by past use, and how changes in institutions and legal doctrine have influenced the definition and processing of disputes. I also discuss the weaknesses shared by some of the research in both fields, such as a greater concern for process than for outcome, a tendency to ignore political aspects of litigation, and an overemphasis on individual disputing behavior. I conclude by suggesting that longitudinal research on trial courts should pay greater attention to change in ideas about law and to shifting conceptions of right and wrong, cause and responsibility, and problem definition.

This article explores the way that a set of cases arising from a specific event, product, or claim form a congregation of cases that displays common features and that traces a discernable career over time. Such a career is related to, but not uniquely determined by, the course of the social activity that underlies the type of case. The relation of activity and case congregation is mediated by a complex structure of disputing activity (including norms, cognitive dispositions, institutions of access, stakes and resources, social support, legal services, and more). In addition to these external influences, such litigation itself influences its future course by various effects on the underlying activity, on the organization of disputing about it, and on the legal setting. Such endogenous effects include holistic effects associated with the size and distribution of the congregation and career effects associated with the way that the congregation unfolds over time. Delineation of these various effects suggests that litigation lives “a life of its own,” partly independent of underlying events in the outside world, but that the regularities in the litigation process are not reducible to a comprehensive pattern since the activity is interactive and strategic.

The concept of thematization—the process by which actors select a frame of reference for their communications—captures an aspect of dispute resolution that is fundamental to Macaulay's description of noncontractual commercial relations and to many recent dispute resolution studies. Thematization both describes the identification of events as relevant to relations between the parties and links these events to special resources and sanctions. In the thematization process managers apply their knowledge of commercial relations and of transaction structures to ensure freedom to choose between modes of handling matters. A pilot study of Danish firms illustrates the workings of the process. The author's preliminary analysis suggests that thematization within the firm determines how various forms of norms are applied at different times. Businessess continue to employ laws and litigation when other forms of governance of economic relationship fail. Thus law is still an important source of power in business.

This article documents and explains the emergence of implicit plea bargaining in the federal district courts during the Progressive and Prohibition periods. Three competing explanations for plea bargaining are tested statistically—the caseload, the substantive justice, and the evidentiary quality arguments. All three receive qualified support. The historical operation of each of these causal paths, however, was shaped by the preoccupation of more elite federal judges with their own professional self-image in the face of Prohibition. Implicit plea bargaining in the federal courts emerged reflexively as an unintended consequence of the failed Progressive assault on the “corrupt” explicit plea bargaining practices of lower state and county courts.

This article examines the ways in which litigation research has taken an insiders' view of the courts and the problematic implications of this position for a more critical analysis of sociolegal institutions. The first part presents a brief overview of the literature, showing the way in which court and judge are often collapsed into one, ahistorical and unchanging actor. Building on this critique, the second part presents a definition of the court as an organization that draws on a historical, comparative, and critical perspective. Finally, part III offers suggestions for expanding and enhancing research on litigation in the future.

This comment argues that to understand the role of trial courts in maintaining a particular order of differences in society, attention must be directed beyond official legal arenas and official rules to the actions of ordinary citizens and of “marginal” legal officials who make law and shape the court through practices that are excluded from official accounts. This move provides an account of the meaning of courts, of cases, and of law that is relational, and that attends to the agency of everyday people in producing and resisting forms of domination.