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The End of the Road? Problems in the Analysis of Disputes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Robert L. Kidder
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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.

Type
Part Two-The Civil Litigation Research Project: A Dispute-Focused Approach
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 15 , Issue 3-4: Special Issue on Dispute Processing and Civil Litigation , 1981 , pp. 717 - 725
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association.

References

1 See the debate between Gluckman and Bohannan on this issue in Nader (1969: 349-418.)

2 Mathematical sociology, building on Simmel's (1955) theories, provides an alternative to the CLRP approach which is so different that I will only briefly mention it here. Mayhew and Levinger (1976) have shown that population growth alone can be a very powerful predictor of growth in institutions designed to control conflict in society. Courts, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, religious and lay counsellors all proliferate at a rate which is a logarithmic function of the rate of population growth. The reason for the accelerated pace of growth in these institutions is that they must deal with the geometrically rising level of interaction density—the geometrically increasing numbers of potential contacts and alliances and, therefore, conflicts which population growth produces. Mayhew and Levinger would aproach the problem of “access to justice” as a simple mathematical problem: have institutions designed to deal with conflict expanded at a rate which keeps them ahead of the conflict potential created by population growth? If the population growth curve can be measured, say Mayhew and Levinger, then a very precise growth curve of conflict resolving needs can be projected. Any gap beween the projected and actual curves is the gap in “access to justice.”

For references cited in this article, see p. 883.