COMMUNITY LAW: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO THE USE OF LAW
This study examined the transformation of the American approach to the use of law. This transformation has occurred primarily since the early 1960s, although many of the trends present in this transition have origins preceding the 1960s.
The Changing Character of the American Approach to the Use of Law
The highly respected British news weekly, The Economist, said, in 1991, that "Americans who don't take out their frustrations with a gun tend to do so with a lawsuit."1 Such was not always the case in the United States. "Our common law tradition, like the legal tradition of other nations, viewed a lawsuit as an evil at best, a necessary evil."2 In the relatively recent past in the United States, "lawyers were specifically forbidden to 'stir up' litigation."3 Public interest groups and lawyers themselves began to challenge this notion in the late 1950s and early 1960s.4 By the mid 1970s, lawsuits had come, by many persons in American society, "to be seen as splendid vessels for deterring misconduct and
1"Cover Your Assets," The Economist, 10 August 1991, 30.
2Walter K. Olson, "The Selling of the Law," American Enterprise, 2 (January/February 1991): 27.
4H. Tolley, "Interest Group Litigation to Enforce Human Rights," Political Science Quarterly, 105 (Winter 1990 1991): 617 638; R. B. Conlin, "'Litigation Explosion': Tempest in A Teapot," Trial, November 1991, 14.
compensating wronged persons."5 The traditional common law perception of lawsuits was "assailed as 'distinctly medieval.'"6
What began in many ways as a means of providing access to the American legal system for the powerless and the poor, however, soon became a movement emphasizing monetary awards, as opposed to the rectification of injustice.7 In the processes, the concept of the law shifted from "cases" to "litigation."8 This shift was given added impetus as la...