In most police, probate, and criminal cases seigneurial courts responded effectively to the wishes of their clients and enforced norms with which most people agreed. This is, of course, still truer of civil litigation, since plaintiffs would generally not sue unless they felt they had something to gain. The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze the meaning of lawsuits within the context of rural society in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy. Ordinary people in northern Burgundy, as we will see, were litigious, with more lawsuits per capita than many other societies in different times and places. It is difficult, however, to know what litigation rates tell us about a society. Court records and litigation rates need to be interpreted with care. The main challenge is to understand the relationship between a lawsuit, a dispute, and a perceived slight or tort. Attempts by sociologists and legal theorists to determine what rates of litigation reveal about the contentiousness of contemporary American society have made this point forcefully. For a disagreement to become a dispute and then a lawsuit, the injured party must first perceive the injury (“naming”), attribute responsibility (“blaming”), and finally go to the person responsible and demand restitution (“claiming”). Only when the person that the victim holds responsible refuses to offer compensation or repay something owed does a tort or debt become a dispute.