HAMLYN - College of Social Sciences and International Studies ...

Civil Justice
Given the amount of official concern about the problem of
civil justice it is striking that there is so much about the subject
that we do not know. Whether one looks at scholarly writing,
empirical research or official statistics, criminal justice is much
better served than civil justice. Most university law faculties
have several courses on aspects of criminal justice. There are
hardly any courses anywhere on civil justice. The subject has
been curiously neglected. 6
One thing we do know is that the disputes that reach a court
for decision are a tiny fraction of the total number of civil
disputes and that most civil disputes do not even reach the level
of being formal claims. To take one illustration, in 1984 the
Oxford Socio-Legal Centre published a study of over 1,700
accidents where in every case the victim had suffered physical
impairment lasting for two or more weeks. Only one in seven
(14 per cent) made a claim, one in eight (12 per cent) obtained
damages; there were a mere five cases out of 1,711 that were
decided in a contested hearing by a court. 7
A pictorial representation of civil disputes is like a pyramid
with the base representing the mass of disputes and the apex
representing the tiny proportion that reach a court, with the
body of the pyramid representing the infinite variety of ways in
which such problems are dealt with by citizens with or without
advice from others and whether or not involving legal proceedings.
The civil justice system is brought into play in only a small
proportion of all these disputes. So the great and continuing
preoccupation with reforming the system is energy applied to a
very small portion of the total mass of civil justice problems in
the community.
Before a situation becomes a formal claim based on law the
victim has to appreciate that the law provides a possible remedy
for what happened which he then decides to pursue. 8 If the
person with the potential remedy is unaware of that fact, he
obviously will do nothing about it. But even if the victim of the
6 See Hazel Genn, "Understanding Civil Justice" Current Legal Problems (1994),
pp. 155-188. For an exploration of many of the problems of the subject see Sir
jack Jacob, The Fabric of English Civil Justice, (Hamlyn Lecture of 1986).
7 D. Harris et at, Compensation and Support for Illness and Injury (Clarendon,
Oxford, 1984), pp. 51, 112.
8 See W. Felstiner et al., "The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes:
Naming, Blaming and Claiming" in Law and Society Review (1981, Vol. 15),
p. 631.
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