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2001 Wis. L. Rev. 577 (2001)
Contract in Court; or Almost Everything You May or May Not Want to Know about Contract Litigation

handle is hein.journals/wlr2001 and id is 591 raw text is: CONTRACT IN COURT; OR ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU MAY OR MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT CONTRACT LITIGATION MARC GALANTER* I. INTRODUCTION This Article attempts to sketch a missing piece of the contract story-how much contract litigation there is, who brings it against whom, how the parties fare, how this has changed over time, and so forth. Contract doctrine is like the baseball rulebook. It tells you what the players are supposed to do and how the umpires are supposed to rule, but you can't envision the game by examining the rulebook alone. This Article makes no claim to offer a full account of the living practice of contract litigation, instead, it supplements the rulebook by presenting another ingredient from which we might construct such an account, a collection of box scores. These may help us to assess the effects of doctrine, to see what difference is made by contract rules and by procedure, or by styles or amounts of legal representation, etc. I confine myself here to summarizing the box scores and leave such assessment to those of you on the field, in the dugout, or in the press box. If I may extend the baseball analogy, this paper also ventures to look at least fleetingly at the coaches, scorekeepers, sportswriters, and fans to see how the activity of the those engaged in physical baseball is reflected in the activity of the mental--or should I say psychic-players. The present article is not the product of a massive research project, but is an example of a low cost bricolage strategy of trying to capture, refine, and juxtapose scattered data already in the public domain, extracting a focussed account from bodies of information gathered for other purposes. In some cases the sources are collections of raw data; in others they are sophisticated analyses. This compilation is only feasible by not being overly sensitive to the pitfalls of the former or the intricacies of the latter. * John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin Law School; Centennial Professor, London School of Economics. I am grateful to David Gower (Wisconsin, Class of 2002) for his extensive and excellent work on this paper; to Sunil Roy of the Law School Library for invaluable assistance; to Toni Griffin of the American Arbitration Association and Brian Ostrom and Neil LaFontain of the National Center for State Courts for generously supplying materials; to Kevin Clermont and Ted Eisenberg for making available their unpublished paper; and for probing comments to Gillian Hadfield, Richard Posner, and the participants in the University of Wisconsin Law School Contracts Conference, Oct. 13-15, 2000.

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