Japan's reputation for unusually strong emphasis on the avoidance of public conflict and therefore for deemphasis of legal institutions suggests an arid, hostile environment for litigators, especially those who lack substantial resources. In a study of a quasi-class action lawsuit by Japanese air pollution victims, we find that litigation can be developed as a tool in the pursuit of a social movement's wider objectives despite the paucity of resources within the Japanese legal system. Our research documents the many ways in which the delays, obstacles, and costs that characterize the litigation environment in Japan have been either neutralized or turned to the advantage of a social movement because of its commitment to longer-term political objectives rather than short-term victories. The special role of professions in general, and the legal profession in particular, in such litigation combines with class-oriented social movements to produce a political/legal pattern that is neither traditionally harmonious nor a conflict “difficult to contain.”

Informal methods for dealing with conflict within both Japanese and Amish society have been interpreted as being the natural result of, and an important source of support for, traditional cultures. On closer examination we find similar patterns of intentional manipulation of informalist ideology as elements of strategy in the midst of conflict. In both cases, we find informalist ideology being selectively invoked to provide legitimacy to one or more partisan sides in ways which disguise such maneuvers from the majority of their constituent populations. Successful promotion of this ideology sustains the notion, both at the popular level and heretofore among scholars of dispute processing, that nonlaw methods for dealing with conflict have some special ingredient which makes them functionally superior to legalistic methods. If the Japanese and the Amish are in any way representative of a more general case, it apparently takes hard work to preserve anti-legal methods of dispute management.

The longer I serve as editor, the more frustrated I feel at turning down good or promising manuscripts. Whether there has been a change in my own standards or a change in submissions, my overall impression is that I have had to turn away an increasing number of high quality papers. I have dealt with this by reducing the type size in volume 22 and exceeding the page limits by a bit. The result in this issue should be obvious just by the feel of it—it is longer.

The studies reported in this issue stem from a concerted, well-coordinated attempt to deal with the “hidden” dimension of disputing in the United States. The Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP) was prompted by conclusions which have emerged in recent years from a variety of research traditions, all focused on issues of dispute settlement, or “dispute processing” as it has been relabeled. The hidden dimension of disputing was one of many issues which emerged from these disparate research traditions. Given the definition of the problem produced by earlier analyses, the decisions made by the CLRP investigators seem reasonable, and the results to date give some answers.

One need only thumb through the back issues of this journal to sense that the material presented in these two special issues on litigation represents a change of some sort. The post-World War II revival of social scientific interest in law has been characterized by a strong programmatic or policy orientation which has tended to assign a peripheral position to the issues raised in these pages (cf. Black and Mileski, 1973, 3-5). The revival of this interest, which gave birth to this journal, received much of its impetus from concern with questions of social control. Broadly speaking, the question was: “To what extent can legal institutions be used to achieve legally mandated objectives?” The legal impact study's search for the effects of legal acts has expanded to include the conditions which shape those effects. This search has sometimes been informed by theoretical consideration of the organizational processes affecting legal functionaries as they deal with the problems of putting legal doctrine into practice. In many ways, we have learned how legal actions become transformed by their encounter with the “real world.” The law, we repeatedly discover, does not always have its “intended effects.”

Social facts about a profession are usually treated by sociologists as dependent variables—phenomena to be explained (e.g., Carlin, 1962, 1966; Becker, et al., 1961). I propose to analyze the features of the legal profession in a society which uses such services mostly in the pursuit of litigation. While the facts about the Indian legal profession are no doubt interesting in themselves, my purpose is to examine what can be learned about the process of litigation from a study of the profession. The relationship between lawyers' careers and work styles on the one hand and the demands for law work on the other has been presented in general terms by Rueschemeyer (1973: Ch. 1). The data I shall discuss deals with this relationship in more detail, and can, I submit, yield important support for a critique of the various analyses of litigation which assume that its function is dispute settlement.

In its most general sense, social change involves change in the normative order of a society. Some would say that this necessarily involves a change in the patterns by which wealth is distributed. Others look for basic ideological shifts. Still others seek basic changes in the organizational modes by which functions are fulfilled. In each of these approaches, change involves mobility for some portion of the population. The means by which upward mobility is achieved often indicate the outlines of emerging social structures. Pursuit of mobility in a changing social order has entrepreneurial aspects because entrepreneurship involves the creative manipulation of existing relationships in unprecedented (non-normative) ventures. As such, it always proceeds in a normative limbo, relying on conventional expectations to support the unexpected. This study reports on a type of entrepreneurial career crafted in part from two seemingly divergent normative orders. It partakes of resources in the caste and the legal systems in India to produce an, as yet, nonroutinized pattern of personal mobility which, since its occurrence is widespread in urban centers, may be the basis for the formattion of a new class with considerable political and economic significance in the emerging Indian social structure.