The Contract Buyers League (C.B.L.), a group of middle-aged black people claiming to have been over-charged and exploited in the purchase of their homes, emerged on Chicago's west side during the winter of 1967-68. From 1968 to 1971 C.B.L. gained considerable publicity and support for its claims by the use of such tactics as picketing, withholding housing payments, and resisting attempts at eviction. In addition, the members of C.B.L. have had a complicated set of encounters with the legal system which continue at the time of writing (August 1974). This paper uses the most significant of these encounters to explore in a more theoretical way certain aspects of litigation involving poor and minority groups.

This paper examines a controversial area of legal activity—the enforcement of drug laws. It focuses on the experiences of the young, white drug user for whom arrest and processing for drug law violations commonly represent the first serious involvement with the legal system.

It is within the interactions and institutional experience of legal processing that the young drug user alters, reconstructs or solidifies a meaning structure which defines and justifies his behavior (Blumer, 1969). This shaping of definitions and perceptions takes place primarily within a particular institutional setting—narcotics court. The purpose of the court (as it is perceived by the regular actors within the court setting) is to publicly identify the "deviant" thereby setting an example for potential or undetected lawbreakers and to punish the perpetrators of deviance in order to deter them from engaging in further deviant activity (cf., Schwartz and Skolnick, 1962:133).

Two of the major insights of the sociology of law are that legal rights in contemporary society are most often determined by bureaucratic actors and that the results differ systematically from those predictable on the basis of formal law alone (Mayhew, 1966; Ross, 1970; Skolnick, 1966; Whitford, 1968). The decision-maker who determines in practice the extent of legal rights and duties is most often a low-level employee of a bureaucracy—a patrolman, a tax auditor, a building inspector, or an insurance adjuster. He is usually untutored in academic law and possesses discretion because of his isolation from supervision, rather than by design. The decisions in theory may be removed from the bureaucracy and tried in a court of law. Critical attention, however, has recently focused on the fact that most claims based on legal rights are too small to warrant the cost and inconvenience of a formal trial. There has been less attention paid to the fact that bureaucracies typically offer internal means of appealing the decisions of low-level employees. These appeals procedures permit review and modification of initial decisions by higher-level employees, and furnish the claimant with a less expensive and more convenient alternative to the removal of his claim to the courts. Where the claim is small the internal procedure is usually the only avenue of appeal from an adverse decision that is realistically available to the claimant. In these cases, the internal procedure is in fact the ultimate means by which legal rights and duties are determined. This paper reports a study of the functioning and outcomes of one such procedure, the handling of complaints about claims by a typical insurance company, hereafter called Acme.

This paper analyzes who wins and loses in the civil trial courts in Baltimore, Cleveland and Milwaukee. Research was conducted during 1971 and 1972 when a total of 7,800 civil court cases were examined and summarized from the case folders and dockets of courts of first instance with general jurisdiction in Baltimore, Cleveland and Milwaukee. Cases were selected randomly, sampling without replacement, from the 1965 and 1970 records of cases filed from those court records which were open to public inspection (records of paternity suits and adoptions, for instance, were not available). Cases were coded by: (1) the type of legal action initiated; (2) the outcome; (3) the names and addresses of all litigants; (4) the names of law firms and attorneys; (5) the date of filing; (6) the date of last recorded docket entry; (7) the number of court proceedings docketed; (8) the amount of money in dispute; (9) the amount of money awarded as damages; and (10) the census tract of each litigant.

Little is known about the factors influencing the frequency of civil litigation. Courts do not seek their clientele actively. Rather, they wait for litigants to bring cases to them. The determinants of litigation thus have to be sought primarily outside the courts: they have to be sought by analysis of the frequency of all conflicts which are relevant to legal regulation. Conflict of itself does not produce a civil suit: there has to be some initiative to bring the issue before the court. Although we do not know the total population of all law-relevant conflicts (that is, all conflicts which might possibly be regulated by law), we may safely assume that there is a selection process which sifts out all but a small proportion of all potential conflicts. Here, conditions within the courts (among others) enter: the more expeditiously civil suits are handled, the less costly, the more accessible courts are to lay people, the more readily they will take their issues to court.

Courts, unlike most other political institutions, depend almost exclusively on the actions of others to initiate proceedings which comprise their agendas of decision-making. Formal rules and custom proscribe the independent searching out of cases by American courts. These courts may, in a sense, invite litigation by the way they handle certain kinds of issues, but they must await the development of real “cases and controversies;” and, more importantly, they must await private choices which may or may not bring these cases and controversies to court. Recent years have brought some recognition of the importance of such private choice-making activity in setting the boundaries of the policy-making roles which the courts can play. As Donald Black (1973:126) argues, “[t]he day to day entry of cases into any legal system cannot be taken for granted. Cases of alleged illegality and disputes do not move automatically to legal agencies for disposition and settlement.”

In my contribution to the first part of this collection I suggested that the character and impact of litigation might be best understood if, rather than starting from consideration of rules or of institutional processes, we began by looking at the parties and their relation to dispute institutions. I introduced a simple distinction between those actors in society who have many occasions to utilize the courts (in the broad sense) to make (or defend) claims and those parties who do so only rarely. Parties who have only occasional recourse to the courts I called one-shotters (henceforth, OS) and parties engaged in a large number of similar litigations over time repeat-players (RPs). I then argued that an RP might be expected to play the litigation game differently from an OS and that the RP would enjoy a number of advantages in the litigation process. Briefly, these advantages include: ability to structure the transaction; expertise, economies of scale, low start-up costs; informal relations with institutional incumbents; bargaining credibility; ability to adopt optimal strategies; ability to play for rules in both political forums and in litigation itself by litigation strategy and settlement policy; and ability to invest to secure penetration of favorable rules.

Reported opinions are a rich source of dispute data. Ideally they answer a wide variety of questions: who are the parties, what do they want, where have they gone for redress, how was the dispute processed, when was it resolved? Many of these questions can be answered with case data, but caution is required. Disputes leaves trails and traces in many places. Judicial opinions capture part of the story (namely, the official response to specified claims on a particular occasion), but they are spotty dissiers.

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.”