About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 137 (1988)
Lay Expectations of the Civil Justice System

handle is hein.journals/lwsocrw22 and id is 141 raw text is: LAY EXPECTATIONS OF THE CIVIL JUSTICE SYSTEM WILLIAM M. O'BARR JOHN M. CONLEY In this paper we present results from a study of small claims liti- gants' expectations about the civil justice system. Interviews with plaintiffs at the time they file their cases reveal that many people come to court with profound misunderstandings about the authority of civil courts as well as the procedural and evidentiary burdens that the civil justice system imposes. These findings, based on the empiri- cal investigation of litigants' beliefs about and understandings of civil justice, complement experimental studies of procedural justice con- ducted over the past two decades. We find that litigants are at least as concerned with issues of process as they are with the substantive questions that make up their cases. Yet litigants' preconceptions of procedure are frequently at variance with what the law requires and what will happen in the legal process. Such differences suggest that litigants' expectations and understandings deserve attention in the study of their attitudes toward the legal process. I. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE In their landmark study of procedural justice, Thibaut and Walker (1975) argued that the process used in resolving a dispute strongly influences the disputants' level of satisfaction with the resolution. In a series of laboratory experiments, they showed that disputants' judgments about procedural fairness have an ef- fect on the satisfaction that transcends the outcome of disputes or the likelihood that particular procedures will be advantageous to individual disputants. Their work ultimately led many researchers concerned with fairness and consumer satisfaction to reevaluate the traditional focus on the fairness of outcomes (distributive fair- ness) and to concentrate instead on the significance of procedure. The research reported here is a joint project. The authors alternate priority of authorship in their publications. The research was supported by Grants SES 85-21528 and SES 85-21574 from the Law and Social Science Program of the National Science Foundation. We acknowledge with appreciation the assist- ance of the officials of the small claims courts and the clerk's office in Denver, Colorado; the persons (identified in this paper by pseudonyms) whose cases we studied; and our research assistants, Mark Bielawski and Rebecca Schaller. Allan Lind provided much assistance with the literature on procedural justice and offered helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Volume 22, Number 1 (1988)