Since Marc Galanter (1974) formulated the hypothesis that parties with greater resources, usually “repeat players,” fare better in courts and are better able to influence legal change than “one shotters,” numerous scholars have provided empirical insights into the extent to which stronger parties enjoy advantages in litigation. Studies of U.S. trial courts provide evidence that “haves” do tend to come out ahead (Galanter 1974; Owen 1971; Wanner 1975). Governments generally have been more successful in litigation than businesses and other organizations, which in turn have been more successful than individual litigants. Greater resources allow the “haves” to hire the best lawyers and incur the expenses for extensive discovery, expert witnesses, appeals to higher courts, and other activities. As repeat players, they can structure their interactions with the courts by carefully selecting cases to pursue, engaging in forum shopping, settling cases when the prospects appear low for success at trial or on appeal, implementing comprehensive litigation strategies, and developing favorable legal precedents.

This research note examines the relations between judicial preferences, institutional concerns, and litigation outcomes. I found that in litigation before the Israeli High Court of Justice, the “haves” enjoyed only a limited advantage over “have nots” in litigation outcomes. I also found that when “have nots” were represented by legal counsel, the “haves” did not come out ahead. Ideological propensities of judges and considerations of institutional autonomy can ameliorate, to some extent, the inherent inferiority of “have nots” in litigation. It was also found that the mechanisms that worked in favor of “have nots” operated not only in litigation that reached final judicial disposition but also when the litigation was disposed through out-of-court settlements.

Whenever I attend a Law and Society Association function, I get the image of a family gathering. Whether it is the annual meeting, or a “birthday” celebration such as this symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of Marc Galanter's classic work “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” (Galanter 1974), the occasions always take on an air of kinship, with people engaging their academic forebears, siblings, and progeny in discussions about their latest projects. Although the family embraces many diverse lineages, clearly the black sheep of the family are the economists. The few brave economists who dare to attend can usually be found off in a group, amusing themselves with some recent empirical work or the latest development in game theory. In presenting our work on panels, we are often (but not always) met with polite silence or with questions asking us to defend some part of Richard Posner's work, even if our own work is critical of the traditional economic analysis of law. Occasionally at one of these family gatherings, someone even presents a paper that suggests it might be dangerous to associate with economists (Rostain 1998).

Marc Galanter's 1974 article “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” has been exceptionally influential, and for good reason. Its analytic elegance and power, particularly in its famous distinction between repeat players and one-shotters, have illuminated many aspects of the legal process. Yet the article's influence also stems at least in part, I suspect, from the tension between its two related but very different motifs. It predicted that resource-rich parties will generally fare better than other parties in the legal system, and provided a coherent theoretical account of why: because such parties are more likely to be “repeat players” that have the organizational and resource capacities to “play for rules” over the long term. The “Haves” article also, on this basis, provided a coherent theoretical account of how the fates of “have not” parties in the legal system may be improved: by upgrading their capacities for longer-term strategic action, principally through increasing the funding of legal services, improving access to legal knowledge and skills, and organizing diffuse “have not” classes as repeat players. In these and other ways, “have nots,” he suggested, may achieve some of the organizational and structural advantages held by the “haves” (1974:140–44). This subtext might have had its own subtitle to “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead,” such as “And How the ‘Have Nots’ Can Organize to Come Out Less Far Behind.”

This piece comments on Galanter's article “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” and on articles in this symposium that extend Galanter's thesis or put it to an empirical test. It suggests, first, that none of this work goes very far in explaining why the “haves” do better than the “have nots” in social or even legal life; second, that it has yet to be shown that repeat playing is important to litigation; and third, that despite the passage of 25 years, it is still not clear that in litigation the “haves” come out ahead.

The “Haves” paper was written in a different age. Its core was composed in the fall of 1970 when I was a fellow at the Yale Law School's remarkably fruitful soft-money Program in Law and Modernization. This was before the ascent of law and economics, before the emergence of critical legal studies and its progeny, before the promotion of alternative dispute resolution, before the arrival of the new legal journalism and the informational opening of legal world in 1979. The Law and Society Association, founded in 1964, was largely a support group dedicated to publishing the Law & Society Review (then in volume 5) and had not yet held a national meeting.