“Legal secrets” are secrets that the law of torts or contracts either require to be—or protect from being—divulged. The secrets themselves are without limit: a professor's past as a former priest, things learned while in a previous job, that a house has running water only twelve hours each day, that land was worth more than its owner realized, that a patient told his psychotherapist that he planned to kill his girlfriend, that the Treaty of Ghent was signed ending the War of 1812, and on and on. The legal flags under which these battles for the control of secret information are fought reduce to the law of fraud, privacy, trade secrets, and implied warranties. And the underlying economic or other principles that are proposed to explain the decisions in these areas of law are even fewer.

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.