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Afterword: Explaining Litigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Marc Galanter
Marc Galanter*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
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Extract

In my contribution to the first part of this collection I suggested that the character and impact of litigation might be best understood if, rather than starting from consideration of rules or of institutional processes, we began by looking at the parties and their relation to dispute institutions. I introduced a simple distinction between those actors in society who have many occasions to utilize the courts (in the broad sense) to make (or defend) claims and those parties who do so only rarely. Parties who have only occasional recourse to the courts I called one-shotters (henceforth, OS) and parties engaged in a large number of similar litigations over time repeat-players (RPs). I then argued that an RP might be expected to play the litigation game differently from an OS and that the RP would enjoy a number of advantages in the litigation process. Briefly, these advantages include: ability to structure the transaction; expertise, economies of scale, low start-up costs; informal relations with institutional incumbents; bargaining credibility; ability to adopt optimal strategies; ability to play for rules in both political forums and in litigation itself by litigation strategy and settlement policy; and ability to invest to secure penetration of favorable rules.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 2: Litigation and Dispute Processing: Part II , Winter 1975 , pp. 347 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of these remarks was presented at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto, August 1974 and has appeared in the Rundbrief of the Sociology of Law section of the Deutsche Gessellschaft für Soziologie. I am indebted to the participants in the Law and Development Seminar at Buffalo and the Law and Behavioral Sciences Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and to Professor Upendra Baxi for helpful, if not entirely cooptable, comments; to Dr. Jeddy Lever for allowing me to utilize his unpublished work; and to Rosemary Vogt for assistance in preparing the tables.

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