While there is a sizable and growing literature in the social sciences on litigation and the transformation of disputes, it has largely focused on the pressing of claims between individuals or organizations. In instances when research has focused on the government as an actor, typically the emphasis has been on its reactive role as a defendant. In contrast, little is known about the role and impact of government when it decides to pursue civil damage lawsuits against private parties. This area of litigation is particularly valuable for scientific study not only because it is an important piece of the landscape of disputing but also because subsequent litigation by parties may be affected by their understanding and perception of government's decision to sue. Drs. Canan and Pring examine the use of lawsuits by government in a particularly important sphere of activity at the intersection of law and politics: when civil damage lawsuits are filed against citizens who have asserted their views on public policy issues. These disputes are instances of transformation from the political to the legal arenas. By focusing on the dynamics influencing their initiation, processing, and outcomes, these investigators are able to assess the potential chilling effects of these lawsuits on future citizen participation (of these defendants and others). Their work is guided by the hypothesis that such lawsuits are more than instances of simple dispute transformation insofar as they function to reprivatize conflicts made public by virtue of citizens' public grievance. Specifically, Drs. Canan and Pring undertake a two-phase project: The first phase involves ten case studies using systematic open-ended interviews. This phase explores within- party social characteristics, between-party social dynamics, and extra-legal outcomes that occur as the dispute moves from private to public attention and from political to judicial arenas. The second phase, a comparative survey, seeks to measure quantitatively the dynamics of disputing and to test the chilling effects of such suits on the local polity. The sampling design calls for defendants from 100 lawsuits, 100 persons involved but not named in those suits, and 100 persons engaged in comparable activities but with no knowledge of such litigation. Rigorously meshing qualitative and quantitative data, the work of Drs. Canan and Pring should add to our scientific understanding of the uses and consequences of legal action in an area which to date has only been sporadically and anecdotally addressed.
