Civil litigation in the United States, 1977-1979

The Civil Litigation Research Project was based at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Organized in 1979, the major goals of the project were the development of a large data base on dispute processing and litigation and the collection of information, especially on the costs of civil litigation. The unit of analysis is the "dispute" or "case." These were selected from records of courts or alternative dispute processing institutions, or as reported by individuals in the household screening interview or the organizational screening interview. Thus the data collection includes information from several sources: court records on 1,645 cases in state and federal courts in five judicial districts (361 in Eastern Wisconsin, 316 in Central California, 298 in Eastern Pennsylvania, 301 in South Carolina, and 369 in New Mexico), information from the institutional records of cases sampled from various alternative dispute processing institutions, a screening survey of households, and surveys of lawyers, litigants, organizations and disputants identified by the screening survey. ICPSR has 3 data files and 19 files of documentation, frequencies, and introductory materials for this study.