NCJ Number
90435
Date Published
1983
Length
408 pages
Annotation
This volume presents background papers, conceptual essays, and methodological studies bearing upon civil litigation and other forms of handling civil disputes along with reports on analyses of parts of the data base collected in the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP).
Abstract
The studies presented in this volume include all those not contained in full in prior volumes of this final report. Throughout the project, efforts were divided between theoretical and empirical tasks. The theory papers included in this volume focus on dispute decisionmaking, drawing upon work in a variety of disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, and psychology. Issues addressed by the theoretical work are lawyer effort, household investment decisions, dispute emergence, and transformation of disputes. The empirical efforts of the CLRP were directed toward three goals: the development of a large data archive on dispute processing and litigation, the collection of data bearing especially on the costs of civil litigation, and the analyses of much of these data. Some of the methodological and empirical discussions presented cover studying courts in context, the analysis of a survey dealing with the choice of a forum for cases addressing the abolition or modification of the Federal diversity of citizenship jurisdiction, measuring the pace of civil litigation in Federal and State trial courts, and the institutional cost of civil disputes. Another paper compares arbitration to litigation regarding case processing time, disposition mode, and cost. The empirical studies contain tabular data. For related material, see NCJ 90436.