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57 Stan. L. Rev. 1255 (2004-2005)
The Hundred-Year Decline of Trials and the Thirty Years War

handle is hein.journals/stflr57 and id is 1269 raw text is: SYMPOSIUM ARTICLES THE HUNDRED-YEAR DECLINE OF TRIALS AND THE THIRTY YEARS WAR Marc Galanter* Although it defies popular images of the ubiquity of trials, an abundance of data shows that the number of trials-federal and state, civil and criminal, jury and bench-is declining.1 The shrinking number of trials is particularly striking because virtually everything else in the legal world is growing-the population of lawyers, the number of cases, expenditures on law, the amount of regulation, the volume of authoritative legal material, and not least the place of law, lawyers, and courts in public consciousness.2 But, curiously, the image of law in public consciousness is centered on the trial. The media's obsession with trials, fictional and otherwise, combines with myths about excessive litigation to make the decline invisible to the public and, in large measure, to legal professionals. John & Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin Law School; Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science. I am grateful to my colleague Stewart Macaulay for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to Angela Frozena for her excellent work on the analysis and presentation of the data. 1. Marc Galanter, The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts, 1 J. EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD. 459 (2004). Counting trials is itself a complex and daunting enterprise. There are multiple points at which one might determine that a trial begins-the selection of a jury, the presentation of evidence, and so forth. The various state standards are noted in Brian J. Ostrom et al., Examining Trial Trends in State Courts: 1976-2002, 1 J. EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD. 755, 762-63 (2004). In the federal courts, a trial is defined as a contested proceeding before a judge or jury at which evidence is introduced a definition that includes events other than the classical trial leading to verdict or judgment. Admin. Office of the U.S. Courts, Form JS-10 (November 2000), . The underlying federal data for Figures 1 and 3 below is a count of cases that terminated during or after trial, so cases that settle during trial are included, as are trials conducted by magistrate judges as well as by Article III judges. On the complexities of counting federal trials, see Galanter, supra, at 461, 466, 475-76. 2. For somewhat dated but still relevant information on the growth of various dimensions of the legal system, see Marc Galanter, Law Abounding: Legalisation Around the North Atlantic, 55 MoD. L. REv. 1 (1992). 1255

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