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Studying the Frequency of Civil Litigation in Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Erhard Blankenburg
Erhard Blankenburg*
Affiliation:
Berlin Wissenschaftszentrum
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Extract

Little is known about the factors influencing the frequency of civil litigation. Courts do not seek their clientele actively. Rather, they wait for litigants to bring cases to them. The determinants of litigation thus have to be sought primarily outside the courts: they have to be sought by analysis of the frequency of all conflicts which are relevant to legal regulation. Conflict of itself does not produce a civil suit: there has to be some initiative to bring the issue before the court. Although we do not know the total population of all law-relevant conflicts (that is, all conflicts which might possibly be regulated by law), we may safely assume that there is a selection process which sifts out all but a small proportion of all potential conflicts. Here, conditions within the courts (among others) enter: the more expeditiously civil suits are handled, the less costly, the more accessible courts are to lay people, the more readily they will take their issues to court.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 2: Litigation and Dispute Processing: Part II , Winter 1975 , pp. 307 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to Peter Macnaughton-Smith and Marc Galanter whose comments on a prior draft helped me to put my idea more clearly, and who helped me in climbing over some of the language barriers.

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