Can Individuals Get Justice from Large Organizations? A Research Agenda for the Study of Law in Society.

In Restorative Justice & Responsive Regulation (2002), John Braithwaite argues that in contemporary societies (1) a large and steadily increasing proportion of the injustices individuals experience arise from their interactions with large, bureaucratically-organized governmental agencies and business corporations; (2) in making legal claims against such sophisticated "repeat player" organizations, it is extraordinarily difficult for individuals to prevail. The implication is that the quantum of injustice individuals experience is increasing. Studies by Lauren Edelman and colleagues suggest that the internal dispute-resolution systems established by large organizations are largely symbolic, conflict-dampening systems, unlikely to vindicate individuals' "justice claims." Yet the Wisconsin Civil Litigation Project in the late 1970s indicated that most disputes are resolved at that level, and that a very significant proportion of claimants get some or all of what they had claimed. We need to know more. With the exception of the research by Edelman et al, and some studies of complaint systems in some urban police departments (e.g, by Douglas Perez and by Charles Epp), there has been little systematic study of inter-organizational, inter-issue, or temporal variation in how responsive organizational dispute-resolution systems are to individual claims, or in how well such systems use claims data to reduce the incidence of complaint-stimulating harms or injustices. This paper will outline the issues and argue that students of civil justice ought to intensify their focus on the factors (market pressures, government regulation, class action lawsuits, professional norms) that account for inter-organizational and temporal variability in the responsiveness and "regulatory effectiveness" of intra-organizational claims or dispute-resolution systems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]