Social facts about a profession are usually treated by sociologists as dependent variables—phenomena to be explained (e.g., Carlin, 1962, 1966; Becker, et al., 1961). I propose to analyze the features of the legal profession in a society which uses such services mostly in the pursuit of litigation. While the facts about the Indian legal profession are no doubt interesting in themselves, my purpose is to examine what can be learned about the process of litigation from a study of the profession. The relationship between lawyers' careers and work styles on the one hand and the demands for law work on the other has been presented in general terms by Rueschemeyer (1973: Ch. 1). The data I shall discuss deals with this relationship in more detail, and can, I submit, yield important support for a critique of the various analyses of litigation which assume that its function is dispute settlement.

Accounts of the legal scene in Asia often refer in passing to the activities of a shadowy set of backstage characters encountered in the peripheries of the law. The assessment of the peripheral figures has varied. Only very recently have they received much direct attention from students of Asian social life and those concerned with planning social change. Earlier accounts came mostly from colonial administrators, law officers and occasionally from the local intelligensia (Morrison, 1972b: 327). These reports were invariably derogatory. They blamed these peripheral figures for a socially and economically destructive proliferation of litigation, and depicted them as swarming at the courts where for ill-gotten personal gain, they encouraged and facilitated lawsuits among the peasantry. But these figures were never described in much detail and their work seems rarely to have been observed at first hand. A variety of European terms were used to characterize them: “sea advocates,” “bush lawyers,” “touts,” and the like. Both lay and semi-official roles seemed to be included.

Man is an ingenious social animal. Institutionalized responses to interpersonal conflict, for instance, stretch from song duels and witchcraft to moots and mediation to self-conscious therapy and hierarchical, professionalized courts. The dispute processing practices prevailing in any particular society are a product of its values, its psychological imperatives, its history and its economic, political and social organization. It is unlikely that any general theory encompassing all of these factors will be developed until there have been many piecemeal attempts to understand something of the influence of each.

This essay attempts to discern some of the general features of a legal system like the American by drawing on (and rearranging) commonplaces and less than systematic gleanings from the literature. The speculative and tentative nature of the assertions here will be apparent and is acknowledged here wholesale to spare myself and the reader repeated disclaimers.

I would like to try to put forward some conjectures about the way in which the basic architecture of the legal system creates and limits the possibilities of using the system ;as a means of redistributive (that is, systemically equalizing) change. Our question, specifically, is, under what conditions can Iitigation be redistributive, taking litigation in the broadest sense of the presentation of claims to be decided by courts (or court-like agencies) and the whole penumbra of threats, feints, and so forth, surrounding such presentation.