This study is an exploratory social history of litigation about public education. Using West digests as an index of appellate cases, it first examines the changing volume and character of litigation from the earliest recorded cases until 1981. It then relates trends in litigation to two broad phases of educational history: the system-building era, when courts helped to clarify the lines of authority in an ambiguously decentralized system; and the new functions of litigation in the twentieth century, when administrative progressives sought to use legislation to reshape schooling. It turns then to the relation between school law and social conflict over basic dividing lines of religion, race, and ethnicity and suggests that courts played a relatively small role in adjudicating such issues until recent times. Finally, it contrasts the recent history of litigation—by some called a “legal revolution”—when excluded groups sought to reshape schooling.

This article examines the patterns and changes in the way trial courts have handled both civil and criminal matters. It does so by looking for similarities between the civil and criminal dockets in all levels of trial courts in two rural counties in Illinois for a 90-year period (1870-1960). The data from these sites suggest that there may be an overall pattern in the way matters are handled, one that has fluctuations and changes within it but seems to have persisted over time. About 90 percent of the matters filed in the two counties did not involve a contested hearing or judgment. The pattern of handling matters was characterized, instead, by shifts between the routine processing of uncontested matters and matters that dropped out of the courts short of judgment. Contested matters were always the exception and not the rule. Contrary to some claims found in the literature, the shifts within the pattern seem to reflect changes in the mix of court business rather than some fundamental change driven by environmental factors and marking an overall demise of trials.

This paper explores the activities of civil litigants in a state trial court between 1820 and 1970. Litigation is considered as essentially a political activity in which the parties utilize the judicial system to promote their respective interests. The analysis indicates that all parties initiate and defend cases consistently in narrow fields across time, representing interests to which the litigants are easily connected. Moreover, if litigation has a large political component, then the inequities and balances of power existing between parties in the wider community probably affect judicial outcomes. To pursue this notion, I classify the court's clientele as either individuals or organizations. Evidence suggests that utilization of the legal process in general, and case outcomes in particular, are determined in part by the pairing of litigants opposing each other. Individuals have more often initiated than defended actions, and the dollar value of their claims has steadily increased, especially against organized opponents. By contrast, organizations have defended much more often than they have filed claims, and their claims are consistently smaller than those pursued by individuals. In general, judicial demands and outcomes vary systematically but consistently over time, according to the legally active group involved, the adversary pairing, and the issues between them.

State supreme courts frequently cite each other as authorities. These citations constitute the interstate communication of precedent. The major direct predictors of this inter-court communication are the legal capital of the cited court, the difference in legislative innovativeness between the two states, and contemporaneous interstate migration. After 1940, inter-court communication is more strongly related to interstate migration than to any other predictor in the analysis. The relationship between interstate migration and inter-court communication suggests that the interstate communication of precedent is affected by cultural regionalism. Inter-court communication is not increased by similarity between states in population size or in levels of urbanization and industrialization. Courts of populous and urban states are cited more by courts of less populated and rural states, but these relationships are mediated by differences in legal capital, legislative innovativeness, judicial professionalism, and interstate migration. Judicial professionalism and the West's regional reporter system are directly related to inter-court communication in the later years surveyed.

The pivotal case in the history of the plea of insanity occurred in London during the reign of George III. In the year 1800, James Hadfield discharged a horse pistol at the king as he entered the royal box at Drury Lane Theatre. Hadfield pleaded insanity to a charge of high treason and was acquitted. The verdict caused much judicial concern, for the law's power over him was at best unclear. Hadfield was taken to Newgate Prison while Parliament hastily passed the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1800, which enabled the government to detain Hadfield for the rest of his life. No longer was a defendant found not guilty on the grounds of insanity entitled to a general acquittal. Insanity became a special verdict linked with automatic confinement for an indefinite period of time. Three other provisions of the act called for the detention of mentally ill persons who were arrested for criminal offenses or found in circumstances that suggested criminal activity.